Book of Ages
The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
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3.9 • 39 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
National Book Award Finalist
From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve.
Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. Lepore’s life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Younger sister of the estimable Benjamin, Jane Franklin was born in Boston in 1712 and passed 82 years later. Doting brother Ben tutored the little girl in reading and writing until he ran away from home at age 17 and she learned housewifery from her mother while getting a primer on the candle-making business from her father. At 15 and possibly already pregnant, Jane married Edward Mecum, a saddler so poor that he moved into the Franklin family home after the wedding. Ben Franklin, busy with the politics of the Revolution, seldom returned to Boston, and Jane, immersed in childrearing, rarely left it. Still, they remained close through correspondence, discussing current events as well as family business. Historian Lepore (The Mansion of Happiness), who has a knack for crafting a beautiful, inventive, and accessible story, has delicately and creatively pieced together a biography of Jane Franklin, despite a lack of surviving letters Jane wrote little else, except for a small hand-stitched book in which she recorded the births and deaths of her 12 children. Lepore, in revealing the affectionate, respectful relationship between Ben and Jane, provides an invaluable view of the lives men and women led in 18th-century America.
Customer Reviews
Book of Ages
A wonderful story told with great care.