Neate Jill

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Biografie:
Jill Neate (1934-1993)
The death occurred in May 1993 of Jill Neate, Alpine Club member and a leading mountaineering historian and bibliographer. She was 58. Her Mountaineering Literature, 1986, an enlarged version of an earlier work, is the internationally regarded authority on books about mountains and climbing in the English language. Booksellers the world over identify items in their catalogues by their 'Neate' numbers, and take immoderate delight when they are able to advertise some obscure piece of ephemera as 'Not in Neate.'
Jill Neate had been born William Neate in London and qualified as a chartered accountant, working in management consultancy and company secretarial services for the Institute of Chartered Accountants. On the deaths of her parents, she moved in 1970 to the Lake District and embarked on a career of mountain scholarship. Soon afterwards began the long, lonely process towards a change in sexual identity.
The patient accumulation of often obscure detail suited her temperament and the peculiar circumstance in which she found herself. Increasingly reclusive, she drew comfort from her correspondence with fellow bibliophiles, and set herself to chronicle the exploration and mountaineering history of those areas which receive little attention in the standard literature. Mountaineering in the Andes was published by the Expedition Advisory Centre of the Royal Geographical Society in 1987 as a source book for climbers. It was an astonishing assemblage of information that had taken seven years to complete. In order to track down elusive Spanish references, Neate had added a working knowledge of that language to the French and German she already possessed. A thorough revision of the work had just been completed at the time of her death.
In 1989 she brought out what many believe was her major work, High Asia, an illustrated history of the 7,000 metre peaks. it covered the mountains from the Pamirs to Assam, and all the little-known mountain groups of China and Tibet, listing their accessibility, history and climbing potential, and giving an extensive bibliography to each geographical section, with an even fuller general bibliography at the end of the book. it has been praised as a 'gem of research'.
Jill Neate translated many European books into English, including several Reinhold Messner titles and Friedrich Bender's Classic Climbs in the Caucasus, and she had produced a Readers' Guide to the Lake District. For several years she served on the Library Committee of the Alpine Club.
Audrey Salkeld
Quelle: Alpine Journal Vol. 99, 1994, Seite 327-328


Geboren am:
1934
Gestorben am:
05.1993