Jane Andrews (author)
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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.[1][2][3] 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.
