Weidenfeld & Nicolson and The Orion Publishing Group are deeply saddened to announce the death of the much loved author Jennifer Worth who wrote the bestselling Call the Midwife trilogy, based on her experiences as a midwife in the East End of London in the 1950s.
Jennifer Worth passed away on 31 May after a short illness. Her three Call the Midwife books have sold almost a million copies in the UK alone and were No. 1 bestsellers. They spawned a whole new publishing sub genre of nostalgic true life stories. In September last year Jennifer Worth published In the Midst of Life, a heartfelt polemic about our society’s need to reevaluate the way we treat death and the unnecessary suffering currently caused by the resuscitation of the elderly and terminally ill.
Call the Midwife is currently being made into a television series for the BBC, produced by Neal Street Productions and scripted by Heidi Thomas, the award-winning writer who wrote the screenplay for Cranford.
Jennifer Worth was a nurse, midwife, ward sister and night sister from 1953 until 1973. She trained as a nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading and then moved to London to train as a midwife. She later became a staff nurse at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, then ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Euston and later at the Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead, all in London.
Throughout her life, music was always her passion, and in 1973 Jennifer left nursing in order to study music intensively. She gained the Licentiate of the London College of Music in 1974 and was awarded a Fellowship ten years later. Jennifer taught piano and singing for about twenty-five years and sang in choirs all over England and Europe.
Jennifer is survived by her husband Philip Worth, whom she married in 1963, their two daughters and three grandchildren.
