She married the artist Philip Worth in 1963, and they had two daughters. She was then a ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Bloomsbury, and later at the Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead. With the Sisters of St John the Divine, an Anglican community of nuns, she worked to aid the poor. Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in the early 1950s.

She then trained as a nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, and moved to London to receive training to become a midwife. After leaving school at the age of 14, she learned shorthand and typing and became the secretary to the head of Dr Challoner's Grammar School. Worth, born Jennifer Lee while her parents were on holiday in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, was raised in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. This is an enduring work of literary nonfiction, at once a warmhearted coming-of-age story and a startling look at people's lives in the poorest section of postwar London. Though these are stories of unimaginable hardship, what shines through each is the resilience of the human spirit and the strength, courage, and humor of people determined to build a future for themselves against the odds. Collett, a Boer War veteran, lost his family in the two world wars and died in the workhouse. Bubbly Jane's spirit was broken by the cruelty of the workhouse master until she found kindness and romance years later at Nonnatus House. Orphaned brother and sister Peggy and Frank lived in the workhouse until Frank got free and returned to rescue his sister. Woven into the ongoing tales of her life in the East End are the true stories of the people Worth met who grew up in the dreaded workhouse, a Dickensian institution that limped on into the middle of the twentieth century. When twenty-two-year-old Jennifer Worth, from a comfortable middle-class upbringing, went to work as a midwife in the direst section of postwar London, she not only delivered hundreds of babies and touched many lives, she also became the neighborhood's most vivid chronicler. The sequel to Jennifer Worth's New York Times bestselling memoir and the basis for the PBS series Call the Midwife

Shadows of the workhouse book