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Book Of Ages: The Life And Opinions Of Jane Franklin (2013)

by Jill Lepore(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0307958345 (ISBN13: 9780307958341)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: Jill Lepore is a scholar who has a gift for writing about history. You don't have to be a specialist to enjoy reading her books or the articles on American history she writes as a New Yorker staff writer. In fact, it was her appealing article there about how she came to write about Jane Franklin that interested me in the book.In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf imagined what life might have been like for Judith, a talented imaginary sibling of William Shakespeare. In "Book of Ages," Lepore reconstructs the life of the real Jane Franklin, a younger sister of Ben. Letters and other documents of Jane Franklin's do exist, but there are great gaps, so sometimes Lepore must surmise, using other evidence, what life might have been like for this intelligent woman who lived mo... morest of her life on the edge of poverty.The resulting biography gives us a real woman, one who stands, for the first time, out of the shadow of her famous brother, whom she admires mostly from afar. Their affectionate relationship, which endures until her death, makes vivid a period of tumultuous political change.Like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's "The Midwife's Tale," Lepore's biography of Jane Franklin allows a reader to understand what life was like for humble women who endured war, the deaths of children, the difficulties of making a living, and illness. Jane Franklin's education was meager, as was typical for women of her era, but her brother Ben sent her spectacles that she might better read about him and about the great doings of the age. Lack of education did not stifle her curiosity; it only sharpened it.M. Feldman
review 2: There are parts of this book that I'd give a much higher rating. I love the premise, a kind of real-life version of Virginia Woolf's "Shakespeare's sister" theory. Here the sister is Jane Franklin, the real-life sister of Benjamin Franklin. What might she have become if she'd had access to the same education and opportunities as her brother? We'll never know, because she didn't, and the differences in their two lives are striking.That said, author Lepore admits it's hard to write a bio of Jane, because there's so little verifiable material. Unfortunately, that means often the book reads more like a bio of Ben, which is not what the book's premise suggests. It might have been better if the author had spent more time comparing and contrasting Jane's life with other women of the time. She briefly mentions Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, and Abigail Adams, and I found myself wishing to read more about them than about Ben. less

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