Dena Vane-Kirkman
British magazine editor
Dena Lesley Vane-Kirkman (1 May 1944 – 19 October 2018) was an innovative British magazine editor who is best known for her work on Woman's World in New York in the 1980s when she was part of a group of British women who made careers editing American women's magazines.
Early life and family
Dena Lesley Vane was born on 1 May 1944, to Ronald Vane, a soldier in the British Army, and his wife Phyllis, a cinema usherette. Her father died when she was two but her mother subsequently married his brother, Leslie, whom she had met at Ronald's funeral.
She was educated at Barton Peveril Grammar School where she was head girl.
Career
Vane-Kirkman's career in the media began with a secretarial job on the Daily Express in London where she worked for the motoring correspondent Basil Cardew and the industrial editor Sir Trevor Evans. She became a reporter and then women's editor for the local Hendon Times where she met her husband Peter Kirkman whom she married in 1965 becoming Dena Vane-Kirkman. Professionally, she remained Dena Vane. The couple had two children.
She became a sub-editor on Woman and then deputy editor of Home and Freezer Digest which she revamped so that it outsold Good Housekeeping. She applied the same formula at Living magazine where she moved it away from housekeeping and cookery towards features on relationships, sex, and women's health.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dena Vane-Kirkman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.