Jane, the daughter of an artisan, was lucky. Only the daughters of the wealthiest men learned to write more than their own names. The Franklin family prized its soap recipe above all else. Revolution was just a twinkle in the American eye when Jane was growing up. Her entire life until that point must be gleaned from her later recollections, from her family history, from her brother’s off-hand comments, from responses to her letters that have survived (men’s letters were much more likely to survive), and from a lot of useful context. The first letter we have from Jane’s own hand was written when she was 45 years old. “Book of Ages” is also a story about how to read silence - and spin a narrative from invisible thread. “Her days were days of flesh,” Lepore tells us, “the little legs and little arms, the little hands, clutched around her neck, the softness. Jane married at 15, was quite possibly raped, bore 12 children, and barely learned to read. Benjamin was able to escape boredom, obtain a (self) education, and carve out a place for himself. As children, Benny and Jenny - as Benjamin and Jane were known - were similarly precocious. “Book of Ages” is much more than a biography it is a story about how the 18th century world differed for different genders. Yet, we can tell she had a fiery wit, no small amount of courage, and that, but for the discriminatory strictures of her time, she might have been as great as her brother.
We know practically nothing about Jane, and therefore cannot remark much about her. Lepore, who has won awards both scholarly and popular - including being a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award - would be the first to point out that Jane is only unremarkable in the narrowest sense. It is not the life of Benjamin Franklin, but rather that of his unremarkable sister Jane that is detailed in “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin,” by Harvard historian Jill Lepore. And she lived in an era in which women were kept low to make way for enlightened men.
The house had belonged to Jane Franklin Mecom, the youngest sister of Benjamin Franklin.
In 1939, the city of Boston tore down a small house that was obstructing the view of a monument of Paul Revere.
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