Book of Ages

Everyone knows the life and times of Benjamin Franklin, but what about the extraordinary experiences and opinions of his beloved sister, Jane Franklin?

“Gabby, frank, and vexed,” Jane’s life story demonstrates a smart, witty, and hardworking woman who birthed 12 children and survived the death of all of them but one. The hidden history of women in early America comes alive through Lepore’s sleuthing arts in this compelling nugget of forgotten history.

Ostensibly an account of the life of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, Jane Franklin, Lepore’s book is also a meditation on the construction of history, exploring the question of why some stories get told and others don’t. Why is Benjamin Franklin now a household name, when most people don’t even know that he even had a sister? If you want to know the answer to this question, read Lepore’s book.

This book about Jane Franklin (yes, one of her brothers was Benjamin Franklin) turns our culture's obsession with the Founding Fathers on its head. What, Lepore asks, did it mean to be a woman in the Age of Revolution? To be sure, Jane was a relatively well-off, relatively well-educated white woman in a cosmopolitan town, and, as their surviving correspondence reveals, she wasn't above giving her celebrated brother a piece of her mind. But she also faced limits he didn't and developed very different priorities. Lepore is justly celebrated for her brilliant storytelling, her sharp insights, her lean, inventive prose—and… show more.

Book of Ages brings to life a woman I didn’t know existed. It excavates the story of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, using her letters and the “Book of Ages” she kept, along with research into child-bearing, marriage, and education for women in the 1700s. Jane Franklin’s life was hard, and her writing was halting, unlike her brother’s polished prose. But still, her sentences are full of personality.

She wrote about kissing her children’s injuries because “The Litle Rogues all want to be Pityed by them that Loves them” and scolded Benjamin for his infrequent letters: “I See you do not… show more.

Who knew that Benjamin Franklin had a much-loved sister with whom he stayed close throughout their widely diverse lives? Jane Franklin married young to a n’er-do-well who never provided for the family. Only a few of the many children she bore survived; she worked ceaselessly to provide food and shelter for those children and her aged parents, and, although barely literate, she found time to write to her beloved brother as he rose to political heights. Lepore, a diligent and imaginative historian, makes the lives of the working poor in Revolutionary era New England vividly real, especially the lives of… show more.

Lepore’s delightful biography of Jane Franklin, Benjamin’s sister, gives an intimate sense of her difficult life, despite daunting gaps in the archives. The siblings were very fond of each other, and Ben Franklin helped his sister on her lifelong mission to educate herself. The wife of an alcoholic and the affectionate mother several children, Jane spent the majority of her time doing, with remarkable good will, the hard, repetitive work assigned to her sex. Even so, she retained her intellectual and political curiosity, reading, deliberating, and recording her spot-on and sometimes hilarious opinions