Jane Andrews (author)
American author and educator
Jane Andrews (December 1, 1833 – July 15, 1887) was an American author and educator.
Early years and education
Andrews was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, as the third child and daughter of John and Margaret Demmon Rand Andrews. Her grandfather, Reverend John Andrews, was pastor of the Unitarian First Religious Society Church and Parish Hall in Newburyport. She attended the Putnam Free School in Newburyport and was part of a small writing group run by Unitarian minister and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson that also included Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford and Louisa Parsons Stone Hopkins. Andrews began teaching in the winter of 1850 at Higginson's evening school for cotton mill workers. The next spring, she began attending the State Normal School in West Newton, Massachusetts, and graduated as valedictorian in 1853. A particular influence was her geography teacher Lucretia Crocker. She lived in the same boardinghouse as Elizabeth Peabody and through her met Peabody's brother-in-law, the educator Horace Mann. Mann encouraged Andrews to enroll at his new school, Antioch College in Ohio, and she became the first student to register there. Her stay at Antioch was brief because in the middle of her first year at the school, a neurological disorder described as a "spinal affliction" forced her to return to Newburyport, where she remained as an invalid for six years.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13563089. VIAF identifies the subject as 61391443. The Library of Congress control number is nr90000855. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1833, 1887, 1850 and 1853.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jane Andrews (author)” 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.