The Complete Call the Midwife Stories Jennifer Worth 4 Books Collection Collector's Gift-Edition (Shadows of the Workhouse, Farewell to the East End, Call the Midwife, Letters to the Midwife)

Product Information

Shadows of the Workhouse (Second book in the Midwife trilogy) Worth, Jennifer (2008). Shadows of the Workhouse. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0297853268. (2005) My mother had planted this seed when we were children. Hearing this made me feel unbearably sad...” (Elsie would say “Jennifer’s the clever one, Chris is the pretty one”.)

Worth saw it all clearly, level-headedly and without illusion. We are fortunate she was there to capture with such compassion a world that – for good or ill – we have irrevocably lost. Jenny was wonderful to visit him and strike up a friendship, but even that at the end wasn't enough when he was forced to move from his home to live in a miserable old people institution. He could have had a comfortable and peaceful death in his own home, instead he had nothing but misery… After everything he went through, the loss of his family, and his years of loneliness he deserved so much more. It was such a painful story.

READERS GUIDE

Any woman of any age could be subjected to this horrifying treatment. At the time the age of consent was thirteen, so a child of that age could legally be regarded as a woman. The Contagious Diseases Act affected only working-class women, because upper-class women never walked in the streets alone, but would be accompanied or in a carriage. Men of any age or class were exempt from arrest and examination, even if caught in the act of soliciting, because the Act of 1864 was specifically designed for the control of women." Others have noticed that the tales of people Worth couldn't possibly have known when they were young have been rather heavily embroidered, and I think we stray more into fiction than memoir at various points. But that doesn't make the stories any less entertaining, indeed compelling, and this book gets five stars simply for being a goldmine of great stories centered around the East End, complete with vivid renderings of dialect and slang. I love this author - she writes so redemptively. The author chronicles a lot of sadness of the poor in this book and it will take a few days for some of it to sink in, and parts of the book really affected me emotionally. Closed after the outbreak of war, it was discovered by Christine and Jennifer. Too tempting. “We just climbed over the rails and found all these rusting skates hanging out of the cupboards. And so we decided to try them!” Christine said.

Shadows of the Workhouse (Jennifer Worth, RN RM, first published in 2005 by Merton Books. Republished in 2009 by Phoenix/Orion). Her subsequent nursing jobs were at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital in Bloomsbury, and finally at the Marie Curie hospital in Hampstead. Jennifer married Philip Worth in 1963 and their two daughters, Suzannah and Juliette, were born. Having decided to embark on a musical career, Jennifer gave up nursing in 1973. She studied the piano and singing intensively, becoming a licentiate of the London College of Music in 1974, and was awarded a fellowship 10 years later. She taught and performed solo and in choirs throughout the UK and Europe. When she felt these musical talents ebbing, she turned to writing. I realize Ms. Worth is a product of her time and I am trying very hard to not judge her unfairly using my time and culture as a standard. But it's difficult to ignore the ethnocentric comments sprinkled throughout the book. She described an impoverished immigrant woman as looking like a Spanish princess. Making the foreign person into something exotic is objectifying, and keeps her in the "other" category. When we got to little Mary, the teenage Irish prostitute, she is described first as a Celtic princess, then as maybe the product of an Irish "navvy" (manual laborer) and then says maybe they're the same thing. Alright. You need to stop right there, lady. Jennifer lived and worked with the nuns of St. John the Divine. Later, she would draw upon these memories to write a trilogy of memoirs concerning life as a midwife in the East End, at a time where post-war poverty and suffering was rife, unmarried mothers were scorned and there was a severe shortage of housing due to the Blitz, which led to intolerable living conditions for many families.

Jenny Lee, the lead character played by Jessica Raine in the first three seasons of the show, is based on Worth herself. (An older version of Lee, voiced by Vanessa Redgrave, also serves as the narrator for the entire series.) After receiving nursing and midwifery training, Worth became a nurse in London in the early 1950s, working in part with the Sisters of St. John the Divine—experiences she later detailed in her books. Le ultime levatrici dell'East End è