Jane Andrews

Jane Andrews (born 1967) is a one-time Royal dresser for Sarah, the Duchess of York, who was convicted of murdering her lover Tom Cressman during a sensational trial in 2001 at the Old Bailey that attracted much public interest, both due to the dramatic circumstances of the killing and the story of the working class girl who mixed intimately with the rich and glamorous, though officially only as a servant.

Early life

Andrews was born in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, the youngest of three children. Her father worked as a joiner and her mother was a social worker. As a child, Andrews was promising and intelligent, excelling in grammar school. But due to the family's debt, they moved to a small townhouse in the nearby seaport town of Grimsby, where she attended Hereford Secondary School.

Throughout her teenage years, Andrews struggled with various psychological problems, including depression, panic attacks and an eating disorder. At the age of 15, she attempted suicide by overdose after her mother discovered her truancy. Two years later at age 17, she became pregnant and had an abortion, which she stated was a traumatising experience.

Jane Andrews (author)

Jane Andrews (December 1, 1833 – July 15, 1887) was an American author and educator.

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 which also included Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford and Louisa Parsons Stone Hopkins. She 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 her to enroll at his new school, Antioch College in Ohio, and she became the first student to register there.