With her extraordinary look at “this most ordinary of lives,” Lepore lets us glimpse both another side of Franklin and an early America with its debtors’ prisons, “dark, tallow-lit rooms” and talk of revolution.
Too often history is the story of famous battles and leaders. So in her scholarly, engaging way she pieced together little-studied documents, public records and letters to tell the story of the sister, six years his junior, who was Ben Franklin’s lifelong confidante and anchor to the past. Brands’ “The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin,” and in 1950 she was the subject of a biography by Carl Van Doren.īut Lepore believes her job is to keep alive our memory as Americans. Oh, letters to and from Jane Franklin pop up in works like H.W. And in her exhaustively researched, enchanting “Book of Ages,” the Harvard professor of American history calls from the shadows a remarkable woman we scarcely knew existed. But perhaps there are times when too much has been lost, and all we can do is mourn.Jill Lepore (“The Mansion of Happiness”) is a marvelous, maverick historian.
“Lepore’s book stands as a valiant testimony to the tragic erasure of women in Jane’s time. It’s reasonable to wonder aloud if Jane might have suffered a miscarriage before giving birth to her first child, but Lepore’s speculation about Jane’s resulting mental state “veers into sheer melodrama.” Worse, Lepore sometimes uses Jane’s comments out of context and doesn’t let on for half the book that they were written late in life. Not all the creative liberties Lepore takes pay off, said Amy Gentry in the Chicago Tribune. In one of her missives, she tells Ben she wished the Revolution had never happened. But Jane starts speaking for herself eventually, and, “as Lepore is delighted to point out,” we can see her learning to assert herself, said Julia M. Lepore has compensated by writing about Jane’s Boston world, and by speculating-for example, that Jane was pregnant when she married. Though she and her famous brother corresponded regularly for six decades, every letter that Jane wrote before age 45 is lost to time. Jane Franklin didn’t leave much for a historian to work with, said Susan Dunn in The New York Review of Books.
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