[citation needed] The book is set in Poplar, in the East End of London, where "Jenny Lee" (Worth’s maiden name) works as a midwife and district nurse, attached to a convent, Nonnatus House (a pseudonym for the Community of St. John the Divine, where Worth actually worked).

[4] The story is split between chapters describing individual mothers and their often-traumatic deliveries, and more light-hearted incidents back at the convent.

[5] The success of Call the Midwife led publishers to release many similar real-life stories about nurses, midwives, and life in the East End of London in the 1950s, most notably Edith Cotterill’s Nurse on Call (Ebury, 2010),[a] and Dot May Dunn’s midwife memoir Twelve Babies on a Bike (Orion, 2010).

[7] Worth's powers of description, authenticity of detail and richness of characterisation evoke from the start an unforgettable milieu – Poplar and the London docklands of the mid to late 1950s – to which I and clearly many thousands of other readers willingly and completely surrendered.

— David Kynaston in The Guardian [8]Worth tells it like it is; and her brisk frankness about birth, copulation and death can make Irvine Welsh read like Barbara Cartland.