She was a small woman but – wow! – she packed a punch. Even in what was laughingly termed “retirement”, when she found time to be an indefatigable member of the editorial board of this magazine, she brought enough energy and enthusiasm to everything she did to shame the rest of us ordinary mortals. Jane Reed made things happen. She would dream up 10 impossible things before breakfast and make a nuisance of herself until they came to pass. She didn’t do anything just for her own benefit but to make other people’s lives better – and, in particular, the lives of girls and women. As the editor of Woman’s Own for the important feminist decade of the 1970s, during which time she turned it into the most authoritative women’s publication in the English-speaking world, and subsequently, in 1982, as the editor-in-chief of Woman, with six million paying weekly customers, she had great influence on the lives of half of the population.

She campaigned on health and equality and expectations and made people think differently. She did it in print and in person. The woman who started work as a £4-a-week tea girl never missed an opportunity to encourage others to raise their aspirations. “Sometimes you have to be scared by your own bravery,” she said.

She was always ahead of everybody else’s game, in her career in magazines, in publishing and later in newspapers. She loved her time as the features supremo on Today in its first chaotic years and she revelled in the challenge of her last “proper” job as Rupert Murdoch’s director of corporate affairs until her retirement in 2002, although she remained a full member of the Times board until 2022.

We will all miss her. Many millions who didn’t even know her name will have reason to be grateful to her.

Julia Langdon