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.
One of the little people, that formed the foundation of our country I took a different tactic in reading this book that may well have shaped the review you are about to read, so it is worth mentioning. A speaker in a TED conference talked about how reading had shaped her life and one of the things she had done was read books in tandem. She chose the pairs based on either subject or a time period so she would experience a story woven from two perspectives instead of one; a kind of stereo effect. Given that I had a biography of Benjamin Franklin (by Walter…
Jane Franklin– Still Mostly Unknown This book disappointed me a bit. Maybe it shouldn’t have because the author did a tremendous job of research into Jane’s life. But, as Lepore, the author, does state there just wasn’t that much information available. Loss of letters, documents, the revolutionary war in Boston and the fact that an ordinary woman’s ( Jane’s) musings were not considered valuable in the 1700s contributed to the dearth of information about her.We do find out, though, that Jane’s life was incredibly…
History Is Not Always About The Great And Famous This remarkable history links the great Benjamin Franklin to his little-known younger sister, Jane Franklin Mecom, and in doing so explores the meaning and scope of history itself. The brother and sister, one of whom is justly celebrated for statecraft, diplomacy, and science; the other who toiled in obscurity raising (and mostly losing) children, grand-children and great-grand-children, maintained a remarkable camaraderie throughout their lives. Drawing on the few surviving letters of Jane…