Jane L. Keddy papers (Ms.2007.028)

Biographical note

Jane Lee Keddy was born in Oklahoma probably in 1911. She held a Le Baron Russell Briggs fellowship in Romance philology and received her master's degree from Harvard University. She chose not to continue on for her Ph.D. and left school to work for Houghton Mifflin publishing company. Her combination of expertise in math, sciences and languages made her a valuable addition to the textbook division and she remained there for about five years. She retired to become a wife and mother, taking up residence in Wakefield, Massachusetts where she lived until her husband's death in 1992. She reentered the work force as her son, an only child, went off to college. She became an editor at Addison-Wesley, again in college textbooks, and then did free-lance work for Little, Brown's college department. Later, she opened her own firm, The Jane L. Keddy Editorial House, and finally founded Parameter Press which specialized in civil rights issues and religion.

Enamored by Samuel de Champlain, the founder of New France, Keddy spent nearly twenty years of her life from approximately 1969 through 1988 researching and writing a 1000 plus page biography of the explorer. She did not record what sparked her interest in Samuel de Champlain or what lead her to start research on her proposed book on the French explorer, but her research was already underway in 1969 when her correspondence shows her requesting photocopies of relevant chapters from previously published materials and promising proper copyright attributions to authors and libraries. As an editor herself, she was scrupulous about such details. Judging from her correspondence with park officials and local residents, Keddy also traveled to as many of the places that Champlain explored as she could and took photographs. From the research, she wrote a book on Samuel de Champlain. All efforts to publish the text proved fruitless, but in the course of her research she had made contact with the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University which houses much original material on Champlain, including first editions of many of his books and some maps.

Keddy's son. Tom, died in 1974 in a tragic climbing accident in Maine. Her husband, Roy C. Keddy, also predeceased her. She herself died in 1995 and in her will left a large portion of her estate to the John Carter Brown Library along with her papers. Part of that bequest was used to set up the Jane L. Keddy Memorial "To be used for Library programs -- acquistions, fellowships, publications, lectures, or staff support - related to the history and culture of early modern France or Italy and the connections of these countries to the Americas" to exist in perpetuity.