The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (New York: Alfred A

ALH Online Review, Series I 1

Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 442 pages.

Reviewed by Rachel Adams, Columbia University

“The question now inevitably asks itself,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1939, “whether the lives of great men only should be recorded. Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography—the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is greatness? What is smallness?” (264). Woolf makes an early appearance in Jill Lepore’s masterful biography, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, her observations about women’s history motivating its project of recovery and repair. Lepore also posits a more direct connection between Woolf and Jane Franklin, who, Lepore believes, may have been a model for the memorable figure of Judith Shakespeare. Surmising that Woolf came across the listing for a volume of letters written by Benjamin Franklin to his youngest sister in a Sotheby’s catalogue, Lepore believes it is likely that Jane inspired Woolf’s fictional account of the short and tragic life of William Shakespeare’s gifted female sibling in A Room of One’s Own.

Woolf relates Judith’s story as a parable of gender inequality, but it is also a story of sibling inequality, in which a sister’s fall is all the more devastating because it is held up against the rise of an equally gifted, equally ambitious brother who would go on to change the course of Western literature. Gender difference plays a similarly determining role in the lives of Jane Mecom, née Franklin, and her older brother, Benjamin. Where Benjamin traveled, Jane lived a life of confinement; where Benjamin enhanced his minimal schooling with a rigorous program of self-education, Jane had little book learning and was ashamed of her poor spelling and grammar; where Benjamin became one of the nation’s founding fathers, Jane spent the prime of her life in pregnancy, child-rearing, and the struggle to keep her household afloat.

To describe Book of Ages as a story of women’s oppression (it undoubtedly is) would be vastly to oversimplify its nuanced account of a complex and evolving, lifelong relationship. Many of us have our most enduring relationship with a sibling, who is often the only person we know intimately from childhood to old age. No matter how great our differences, we share common ancestors, formative life experiences, and memories. This was certainly true of Jane and her brother Benjamin, six years her senior, whose relationship extended over nearly eight decades. Nicknamed Benny and Jenny, they were more alike than anyone

else in the family where he was the youngest boy, she the youngest girl. They loved and respected each other deeply, but after Benjamin left home at age 17, they spent most of their lives apart. Benjamin wrote to Jane more often than any other person. Through letters, they shared news of births, marriages, illnesses, and deaths. They quarreled, made up, joked, exchanged news and gossip, recorded family history, and opined about the era’s momentous political events. While Benjamin, a man of the Enlightenment, put his faith in reason and industry, Jane remained an ardent believer in scripture who frequently chided her brother for his irreverence. That Benjamin admired and cared for his younger sister is undeniable. Yet he never mentioned her in his life story, which would become one of the most influential autobiographies ever written.

“What would it mean to write the history of an age not only from what has been saved but also what has been lost?” Lepore asks. “What would it mean to write a history concerned not only with lives of the famous but also with the lives of the obscure? What would it mean to write a history of the philosophy and politics of the eighteenth century from the brittle pages of Jane Franklin’s Book of Ages?” (242). Lepore has answered these questions with remarkable ingenuity, making her search for an adequate methodology to capture the lives of the obscure a part of the story. Benjamin Franklin published copious articles, books, and pamphlets. His letters and other writings were eagerly collected and preserved by historians even before his death. In their eyes, Jane was unimportant. Many of her letters are lost, Benjamin’s responses the only evidence that they ever existed. When Jane was fourteen, Benjamin wrote, “I hear you are grown a celebrated beauty” (39). There is no way of judging the truth of his statement since Jane’s portrait was never painted, and no other description of her appearance survives. There is no account of Jane’s funeral or a gravestone to mark her burial site. In 1939—the same year Woolf asked her probing questions about the absence of women’s history—Jane’s house was demolished to clear the line of vision for a memorial to Paul Revere. So little was known about her that historians were unsure about whether she had even lived there.

Instead of erasing the evidence of gaps and absences, Lepore makes them her subject, recognizing that silence can speak as eloquently about the values and priorities of a given age as do the contents of its documents and archives. Jane did not keep detailed records of what she thought, read, and did because she was too consumed with the business of bearing and raising children. In the absence of documents, Lepore is left to surmise what Jane must have done and believed. Wondering whether Jane ever read her brother’s famous autobiography, Lepore writes, “Supposing she did. Supposing she was able to ALH Online Review, Series I 3 get a copy. And supposing she was still able to read, squinting and rubbing her eyes. What then?” (236). Leaving her suppositions with a question highlights the impossibility of filling this hole in the fabric of history.

A history of the small and obscure must necessarily have priorities different from a conventional history. Lepore calls her biography Book of Ages after the book Jane Mecom kept to record births, deaths, and marriages in the family. These are the kinds of events that mattered most to Jane, whose body was consumed by childbearing, who endured the deaths of her children and grandchildren, and who loved to gossip about neighbors, friends, and relatives. In her writing, her unhappy marriage to Edward Mecom, a man who ran his family into perpetual debt, is barely mentioned, silence speaking more than any record of his inadequacies. Although she was consumed by the immediate needs of her family, Jane loved to read, had opinions about politics, and took a keen interest in the activities of sedition, war, and nation-building that unfolded during her lifetime. These events are part of the story told by Book of Ages, but they unfold with Jane as the protagonist rather than a marginal bystander.

While there are heroes and villains in Book of Ages, they are not Jane, Benjamin, or the people who orbited their lives. Lepore’s historical subjects are well-rounded characters with motivations and interests too complex to be flattened into good and evil. She reserves judgment for historians, who are called to account for their performance as conservators of the past. Her greatest condemnation is for Jared Sparks, who Lepore describes as “the nineteenth century’s most important historian” (253). Aspiring to write a history of the US based on original documents, Sparks scoured the country in search of writings by and about its founders. He took gross liberties with his archive. If he disapproved of the prose, grammar, or writing style of an author, he simply corrected it, often scrawling directly onto the page of original documents. He had decided opinions about which documents were worth saving—namely the political writings of great men—sometimes cutting up the rest and giving the pieces to friends (260). By contrast, Lepore acknowledges her debt to Carl Van Doren, who became obsessed with Jane while writing about her famous brother. He collected and edited a volume of her letters, as well as writing her biography, but died of a heart attack before the books were published. Lepore quotes a reviewer who wrote, “Mr. Van Doren was too civilized a man to be interested only in the great” (265). Book of Ages is the continuation of his labor, infused by the emergence of feminism and women’s history in the ensuing decades.

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Historians have now been recovering the lives of the unsung and the marginal for some time. By 1939, Virginia Woolf was already calling for histories that would account for women’s experience. We are familiar with the idea that such projects must necessarily use different methods and sources than traditional historiography. While Lepore’s task is not new, she has undertaken it with exceptional care and ingenuity. In foregrounding gaps and erasures, the questions they provoked, and the tactics she used to make sense of them, her book becomes a conversation about historiographical method as much as it is the story of an individual life. Lepore is also a gifted storyteller, producing a book as suspenseful and moving as a good novel, without resorting to fictionalization. In doing so, she shows us the vital role of the small and the humble in producing the textured fabric of history. “John Adams was puzzled by the insufficiency of history,” she writes. “As history, the story of a life like Franklin’s is, finally, a mystery, unless it’s told alongside the story of a life like Jane’s” (241). By recovering the story of Jane’s life with respect and creativity, Lepore has brought new texture to Benjamin’s story and to our understanding of an important period of American history. But Book of Ages does not value Jane Mecom simply because she was Benjamin’s sister. Like countless women’s lives, hers was filled with joy and anguish, with the tedious, mundane tasks of bearing and caring for children, maintenance of domestic space, and preserving a family’s genealogy. Far from worthless, such lives, Lepore shows, can be as illuminating and necessary to the historian as those of their most august contemporaries.