Newspaper article 0n 26.03.2006 (Care of Johnny Briggs):
JANE Meiring, who has died at the age of 86 in Kenton-on-Sea, in the Eastern Cape, was a prolific author and historian.
She wrote the first comprehensive biography of Thomas Pringle, who started the country's first newspaper, the South African Journal, with John Fairbairn. Pringle also waged a relentless battle with the governor, Lord Charles Somerset, for freedom of the press.
Meiring was the first historian to tackle the life of Francois le Vaillant, a colourful French artist and early traveller to South Africa in the 1780s. Her book, Truth in Masquerade, examines Le Vaillant's controversial journals - which were considered far-fetched even in his own time - and provides a fascinating account of his travels into the interior.
Its publication in the mid-60s coincided with the publication of 165 of his water colours, the originals of which were in the parliamentary art collection in Cape Town.
Jane Meiring (nee Rose) was born in Johannesburg on February 24 1920. Her father was an American mining engineer who had been recruited to work on the South African gold mines in the early 1900s, when technical skills were badly needed to support the booming industry.
The family moved to a farm in Addo in the Eastern Cape when she was eight and she was educated at St Dominic's Priory in Port Elizabeth.
She demonstrated an early talent for story-telling. When the children had to collect and clean eggs, her siblings were happy to do her share of the work provided she told them stories while they went about it.
Her first stories were published in Outspan magazine when she was still at school. She continued submitting stories to magazines for the rest of her life and was published in the likes of Blackwoods magazine in Britain, among many other British and US titles.
After reading History and English at Rhodes University, she did radio work for the SABC during the war years, which paid her £1 a story.
In 1943 she married Pieter Meiring, a citrus farmer in Kirkwood in the Sundays River Valley, one of the early farmers in the valley.
Meiring was an early feminist. Her heroines were Olive Shreiner and Emily Hobhouse, who highlighted the inhumane treatment of Afrikaans women and children in British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War. Meiring's mother-in-law and sister-in-law were among them.
The last book she wrote, Against the Tide, is a history of the role of women in that war, and includes an in-depth investigation of the camps. Meiring was correcting the final proofs when she died.
In 1965 she moved to an estate in Mazoe, north of Salisbury in the then Rhodesia, for 10 years when her husband was put in charge of Anglo American Farms.
They retired to Kenton-on-Sea in 1976. Pieter Meiring died in the early '80s. In 1985 she married Eastern Cape ear, nose and throat specialist Dr Melville Marquard. He died four years ago.
Meiring had a powerful personality and brooked no interruptions while writing. She pursued her projects with relentless self-discipline, rising early in the morning and spending a good six or eight hours at her desk.
When friends saw the "Gone Fishing" sign on her door they knew better that to disturb her.
Meiring is survived by three children and two step-chilren.
-Chris Brown
