Jennett Humphreys

Humphreys was born in 1829 in Cricklewood, a district in North London, to a Scottish father, Griffith Humphreys, and English mother, Sarah Leggett Humphreys. She came from a large family and she lived with her parents until they died.^[2][3] As a reader she supplied numerous quotations and other information for entries in the Oxford English Dictionary,^[4] much of which was a by-product of research for an unpublished book on the early history of cooking, and wrote an article on the OED for Fraser's Magazine.^[5] She was the author of nearly 100 articles in the Dictionary of National Biography becoming one of the top six contributors before being sacked without ceremony by Leslie Stephen.^[2]