Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in the early 1950s. With the Sisters of St John the Divine, an Anglican community of nuns, she worked to aid the poor. She was then a ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Bloomsbury, and later at the Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead. She adds: “When Jennifer was alive, I wanted to cry out to her to talk to me. Perhaps she felt the same. Or perhaps she understood – as I do now – that it was what was unsaid, rather than any words that passed between us, that mattered the most. A deep and enduring love.” Some of her patients include Mary and Pearl Winston. She has also nursed Joe Collet, Doris Aston, Monique Hyde and even her friend Jimmy when she was seconded. However the patient that shaped her the most was Lady Browne, Chummy's mother who inspired her to shift careers and work with the dying. I had mixed feelings about Hilda's unwanted pregnancy — she already had loads of kids and the flat her family were living in was a dump, she and her husband couldn't cope with another baby. But what they did to the baby once it was born was awful. They were cruel to just let it drown in a chamber pot full of blood and afterbirth. Why couldn't they have left it at a church or the workhouse? Why did they have to let the baby die in such a horrific way? It was unforgivable what they did, no matter what their circumstances were. In this third book, Jennifer Worth largely reverts to the format of ‘daily’ life based around the life of the convent, and some of the more memorable, less straightforward, deliveries that she and her fellow midwives were called upon to perform. She doesn’t entirely abandon her portrayal of extreme social hardship, so graphically and vividly portrayed her second book, “Shadows of the Workhouse.’

She met her last illness with courage. Jennifer was determined to put into practice the ideas that she wrote about in her last book, In the Midst of Life (2010) – namely, the absolute dignity of the dying person, whose wish for a natural end should be respected. Jennifer had a very happy family life, the deep peace of a life well lived, and a death committed to God. Asthma has always been part of my life, but never eczema. I was fifty seven when it started, just two little itchy patches on my legs. I thought nothing of it. They were so small - nothing could have told me of the horror that was to come. Edit: This is where I got angry. Really angry. In a passage describing how married women were "free" to cheat on their husbands because a pregnancy wouldn't be as difficult as for a single woman, Worth writes: Le ultime levatrici dell'East End è The first book read more like a memoir whereas this one at times read like a fiction book, especially Jane/Frank/Peggy's part. Even though their story was true, I wasn't convinced by Jenny writing from their perspective as if she herself had lived through their experiences, it made everything come across as false and exaggerated. I mean, how did Jenny know exactly what Jane was doing/feeling/thinking as a child? How did she know the things that young Jane did? I doubt meek Jane confided in her about things she thought were humiliating and best forgotten. And how did she know about Frank and Peggy's private relationship? I find it highly unlikely that they explained their incestuous relationship in detail to someone they just worked with. Sure, older Jane/Peggy/Frank probably mentioned things in passing about their adult life and childhood in the workhouse but they wouldn't have shared anything deep or meaningful with her. The stuff Jenny wrote was obviously her own take on Jane and co, and because of that it didn't feel like a wholly truthful account.As such, this book might usefully be required educational reading for every budding social worker, nurse, and care worker. 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. I wanted to read the rest of the series but I think I can probably find another book to read about life in the workhouses.

We who live comfortable, affluent lives in the twenty-first century cannot begin to imagine what it must have been like to be a pauper in a workhouse. We cannot picture relentless cold with little heating, no adequate clothing or warm bedding, and insufficient food. We cannot imagine our children being taken away from us because we are too poor to feed them, nor our liberty being curtailed for the simple crime of being poor... To review this third book on its own is difficult, because my overall response will likely have been shaped by reading the other two books, and, a year ago, viewing the first BBCTV series. I really loved the very, very, funny (but oh so true to life) account of Chummy & David’s marriage, and the meeting of the two families eyeing each other up in church during the marriage service, and how (up to a point) the monumental differences between the upper and working classes were in part healed at the wedding reception afterwards. I don’t want to give too much away. Read it for yourself. The structure of the book is anecdotal, but even I who dislikes short stories, was in no way disappointed. The sisters of the convent become as members of a family, each with their own idiosyncrasies. Each child born is a wonder. And Jennifer, the author, is surprisingly honest about her own weaknesses and failings. In this book we have a man, a sea captain who not only commits incest but prostitutes his daughter to dozens of men on a daily basis, bloody abortion, infanticide, bigamy, bullying and a nun with a major mental health issue. 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.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.