National Book Award FinalistFrom 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 … 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.
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I loved this book. It’s unique in its juxtaposition of the lives of an unknown 18th-century woman, Jane Franklin Mecom and her universally-known and admired brother, Benjamin Franklin. The one illuminates the other, and both illuminate colonial America in a way I hadn’t understood it before. From recipes for soap (wax myrtle?) to the travails of childbirth and child rearing, the difficulties in getting from here to there safely, and even sending and receiving letters–BOOK OF AGES is enormously informative. It gave me a glimpse of Benjamin Franklin as a real person (as opposed to the image he wanted us to have),and a long look into the life of a woman who was quintessentially herself, a woman who gave no thought to her image.
What impresses me most about the book: the importance of reading and writing in Jane’s life, and her longing for time and opportunity to read and write more. “I read as much as I dare,” Jane once wrote to her brother. I’ve been a reader all my life. But reading this book, I am challenged to dare even more.
I think it is a wonderful way to learn about early American History and how our country developed , and Jane Franklin and her connection to her brother was well told , very touching and informative .
Loved this book. Kept me glued and it was like walking thru the time period.
Pod history sunmary
The University of Michigan Alumni Magazine reviewed (and recommended) Book of Ages in its last issue and, having had great success with past recommendations (Edmund Love, Rich Boy, and The Blood of Free Men all come to mind), I borrowed it from the library. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a fan.
The truth of the matter is that Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages proves her lament: histories of great men, novels of little women. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Book of Ages is the biography of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest, and longest living, sister, Jane. She was the only sibling to outlive him, the one to whom he was closest, and the one with whom he shared a lifelong correspondence. This biography is constructed through the letters the Franklins exchanged, not all of which, of course, survive. Lepore fills in a bit of conjecture where necessary: did Jane, for example, read Benjamin’s autobiography, published posthumously? If so, here is what she would have found… And so on. It is not a bad book, but, fair of me or no, Jane Franklin’s life does not require 316 pages, and I became rather impatient.
Book of Ages essentially chronicles the lives of those to whom Franklin was related: siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, all of whom, with few exceptions, led poor, if not hard scrabble lives in colonial America. It does not help the reader that they seem to have used only about 10 surnames among 100 or so people (Jane, Benjamin, Josiah, Sarah, and Jenny being the most common), and so I was hopelessly lost remembering who was who, who begat who, and who, frankly, really mattered.
Unfortunately for Lepore ordinary lives do not make for great reading when relayed in ordinary ways. The reader only has so much interest in the making of soap or the laundering of smalls. For a more vibrant read on Revolutionary times, I recommend, alas, a novel: The Schoolmaster’s Daughter.
(This review was originally published at http://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2014/06/book-of-ages-life-and-opinions-of-jane.html)
Amazing glimpse into the world of our past
Wonderfully crafted and impeccably researched, Lepore’s examination of the life of Jane Franklin illuminates the larger challenges of writing about women in history. I loved this book.