Jane Langton was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 30, 1922. She studied astronomy at Wellesley College from 1940 to 1942, then transferred to the University of Michigan, where she earned her bachelor's degree in astronomy in 1944. In 1943 she married William Langton, a physicist, with whom she had three sons. She continued her studies as a graduate student in art history at the University of Michigan, and earned her master's degree from Radcliffe College in 1948. She completed additional graduate work at the Boston Museum School of Art in 1958 and 1959. She lives with her family in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a town close to Concord.

Although her themes are universal, Langton is a regional writer to the extent that she often sets her novels in Concord. In much of her work she explores how the Revolutionary War and Transcendental periods live on in the latetwentieth-century Concord she knows so well.