[1] Hewitt attended the University of Oxford, where she studied English Literature at Corpus Christi College for a BA and M.St.
[2][3] In 2009, she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to the Department of English and Drama at Queen Mary.
[4] Hewitt's first book Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey was published in 2010 by Granta,[5] and built on her PhD thesis work.
[7][8] Her second book A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind was published by Granta in 2017,[9] and explores the decade of the 1790s through the biographies of five people: poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, medic Thomas Beddoes, and photographer Thomas Wedgwood.
[20] She was married to Pete Newbon, a lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature at Northumbria University in Newcastle, who died in January 2022.