Over Jane Grigson

Jane Grigson was born in Gloucester in 1928 and brought up in Sunderland where her father George Shipley McIntire was Town Clerk. During the Second World War Jane and her younger sister, Mary, were educated at Casterton School, Westmoreland from where Jane proceeded to Newnham College, Cambridge to read English Literature. Following graduation in 1949 she spent three months in Florence.

After working in art galleries and in publishing, Jane joined the publisher, George Rainbird, in 1953 as a picture researcher for the encyclopedic 'People,Places, Things and Ideas' to be published by Thames & Hudson. The editor of the book was the author and poet, Geoffrey Grigson. Thus began a remarkable partnership and a great love affair which lasted until Geoffrey's death in 1985, aged 80.

Jane then spent ten years as a translator from Italian, sharing with Father Kenelm Foster the John Florio Prize in 1966, for the translation of Beccaria's 'Of Crimes and Punishment'. In the early sixties, Jane and Geoffrey with their daughter, Sophie, began to divide their time between a farmhouse in Broad Town in Wiltshire and a 'cave-cottage' in Troo in France. It was at this time that Jane's interest in food and cooking deepened. Her career as a food writer began as a collaboration with a friend, Adey Horton, on a work about French charcuterie. Horton later withdrew from the project and Jane continued her scrupulous research for the magisterial 'Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery' published in 1967 to high acclaim.

As a result of the book, in 1968 Elizabeth David recommended Jane to The Observer newspaper as their food columnist. Jane's long association with the newspaper led to some of her most popular titles: Good Things(1971), Food with the Famous (1979), The Observer Guide to British Cookery (1984) and The Observer Guide to European Cookery (1983). For her Vegetable Book (1978) and her Fruit Book (1982), Jane received both the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award and the Andre Simon Memorial Fund Book Award. Jane's other works include Fish Cookery (1973), English Food (1974), and The Mushroom Feast (1975).

Jane Grigson died at Broad Town on the eve of her 62nd birthday in 1990.