Jennifer Speake

Jennifer Speake
BornJennifer Drake-Brockman
1944 (age 79–80)
Toronto, Canada
OccupationWriter
CitizenshipCanadian, British
SpouseGraham Speake

Jennifer Speake, née Drake-Brockman (born 1944, Toronto) is a Canadian-British freelance writer and editor of reference books.

Life

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Jennifer Anne Speake was born in Toronto in 1944.[citation needed] She was the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Guy Percy Lumsden Drake-Brockman and Vera Mary McLeod Harrison Topham, later of Hilton, KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.[1][better source needed] She has an MA and BPhil.[citation needed]

Career

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Working at Oxford University Press, Speake helped OED editor John Simpson bring out a second edition of his Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, and a third edition in 1998. She became sole editor for the fourth (2003) and subsequent editions.[2] Speake's other work included a biography of Thomas Vaughan, a philosopher from Wales.[3]

Speake's three-volume 2003 encyclopedia of travel literature received a 2004 Reference and User Services Association award.[4] One reviewer called it "an amazing collection of those people, famous, not-so-famous, and infamous alike, who have traveled the world over, with long lists of additional books for the travel narrative lover".[5] Another reviewer, while noting inconsistency in its coverage, praised it as providing "an unusually rich entrée into an immense field that crosses cultural, historical and discipinary boundaries."[6]

Selected publications

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  • Drake-Brockman, Jennifer; Turner, A. J. (1974). "An emblematic watch by Gribelin". Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance. 36 (1): 143–150. ISSN 0006-1999. JSTOR 20675174.
  • Rudrum, Alan; Drake-Brockman, Jennifer (1984). The works of Thomas Vaughan. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-812473-2. OCLC 9281738.[7]
  • Speake, Jennifer (1983). Biblical quotations. New York: Facts on File Inc. ISBN 9780871962416. OCLC 9217946.[8]
  • Simpson, John; Speake, Jennifer, eds. (1992). The Concise Oxford dictionary of proverbs (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-866177-0. OCLC 24872450.[9]
  • Speake, Jennifer (2003). Literature of travel and exploration : an encyclopedia. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn. ISBN 1-57958-247-8. OCLC 55631133.[10]
  • Simpson, J.A..; Speake, Jennifer (2003). The Oxford dictionary of proverbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860524-2. OCLC 52696399.[11]
  • Bergin, Thomas Goddard; Speake, Jennifer (2004). Encyclopedia of the Renaissance and the Reformation. New York: Facts On File. ISBN 0-8160-5451-7. OCLC 53880313.[12][13]


Personal life

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In the 1970s she married Graham Speake,[1] an English classicist and academic publisher.[14]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Marriages". The Times. 24 September 1971. p. 14.
  2. ^ Mieder, Wolfgang (2018). "The Word [and Phrase] Detective: A Proverbial Tribute to OED Editor John Simpson" (PDF). Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship. 35 (1): 227.
  3. ^ Speake, Jennifer (2004). "Vaughan, Thomas (1621–1666), hermetic philosopher and alchemist". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/28148. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. Retrieved 2022-10-21. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. ^ Committee, Rusa Codes Reference Sources (Spring 2004). "Outstanding Reference Sources: The 2004 Selection on Recent Titles". Reference & User Services Quarterly. 43 (3): 215–216. JSTOR 20864201.
  5. ^ Ellsworth Ross, Abigail F. (Spring 2004). "Review: Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia by Jennifer Speake". Reference & User Services Quarterly. 43 (3): 267–268. JSTOR 20864220.
  6. ^ Burton, Stacy (Summer 2004). "Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia by Jennifer Speake". Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 11 (2): 279–280. doi:10.1093/isle/11.2.279. JSTOR 44086328.
  7. ^ Reviews for The works of Thomas Vaughan
  8. ^ Reviews for Biblical Quotations
  9. ^ Reviews for The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs
  10. ^ Reviews for Literature of Travel and Exploration
  11. ^ Reviews for The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs
  12. ^ Reviews for Encyclopedia of the Renaissance and the Reformation
  13. ^ Woolf, D. R. (Winter 1988). "Review: The Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, by Thomas G. Bergin and Jennifer Speake". The Sixteenth Century Journal. 19 (4): 702–703. doi:10.2307/2541028. JSTOR 2541028.
  14. ^ "How one man came to love the mountain that also captivated the Prince of Wales". Banbury Guardian. 13 February 2016.