Jill Lepore - Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 by Jill Lepore

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-95835-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-95834-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lepore, Jill, [date]
Book of ages : the life and opinions of Jane Franklin / Jill Lepore.First Edition.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-307-95834-1
1. Mecom, Jane, 17121794. 2. Franklin, Benjamin, 17061790. 3. WomenUnited StatesSocial conditions18th century. 4. Boston (Mass.)Biography. I. Title.
E 302.6. F 8L427 2013
973.3092dc23
[B] 2013001012

Cover portrait of Jane Flagg Greene (Jane Franklins granddaughter) by Joseph Badger, oil on canvas, 1765, Thayer Memorial Library, Lancaster, Massachusetts
Cover design by Kelly Blair

adapted by Robert Bull, from Jane Mecom by Carl Van Doren (New York: Viking, 1950)

v.3.1

In memory
of my father
and of my mother
their youngest daughter
places this stone

One Half of the World

does not know

how the other Half lives.

B ENJAMIN F RANKLIN ,
Poor Richards Almanack

Benjamin Franklins sister Jane thought of her brother as her Second Self. He was the youngest of ten sons; she was the youngest of seven daughters. Benny and Jenny, they were called, when they were little. No two people in their family were more alike.

Their lives could hardly have been more different. He ran away from home when he was seventeen. She never left. He taught himself to write with wit and force and style; she never learned how to spell. The day he turned twenty-one, he wrote her a lettershe was fourteenbeginning a correspondence that would last until his death sixty-three years later. He became a printer, a philosopher, and a statesman. She became a wife, a mother, and a widow. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. She strained to form the letters of her name. He loved no one longer. She loved no one better. He wrote more letters to her than he wrote to anyone. All her life, she wrote back: letter after letter filled with news and recipes and gossip and, when she was truly, sorely vexed, and only then, with her blistering opinions about politics.

He wrote the story of his life, a well-turned tale about a boy who runs away from poverty and obscurity in cramped, pious Boston and leaves all that behindleaves home behind, leaves his sister behind, leaves the past behindto become an enlightened, independent man of the world: a free man. It is one of the most important autobiographies ever written. It is also an allegory about America: the story of a man as the story of a nation.

In that story, he left her out. Never once did he so much as mention her name. All the same, little of what Benjamin Franklin wrotenot the Silence Dogood essays, not Poor Richards Almanack, not The Way to Wealth, not the autobiographycan be understood without her. This book, a history of the life and opinions of Jane Franklin, contains with it a wholly new reading of the life and opinions of her brother. But more, it tells her story. Like his, her life is an allegory: it explains what it means to write history not from what survives but from what is lost. One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives, Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.

She never wrote the story of her life. This would scarcely have occurred to her. But she did once write a book. She stitched four sheets of foolscap between two covers to make sixteen pages. On its first page, she wrote,

She called it her Book of Ages.deaths of her children, a litany of grief.

I once held it in my hands. It was so small, so fragile, so plain, her handwriting so tiny and cramped. Sixteen pages and, as I turned them, I discovered that she had left the last pages blank. Had she nothing more to say?

Virginia Woolf once asked, What would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith? Woolf gave herself permission to invent this Judith ShakespeareLet me imagine, since facts are so hard to come byand conjured a girl as brilliant and daring as her brother:

She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brothers perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.

What, Woolf wondered, would have been Judith Shakespeares fate?

Before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart?

Judith Shakespeare did break her fathers heart: she ran away. The force of her own gift alone drove her to it, Woolf wrote. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summers night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. In London, she was seduced by an actor, after which she found herself with child by that gentleman and sowho shall measure the heat and violence of the poets heart when caught and tangled in a womans body?killed herself one winters night.

Judith Shakespeare is a figment of Virginia Woolfs imagination, a heroine trapped, skirts aflutter, in a modern, manly idea of the self, and of the author as solitary and unencumbered: a free man. No American writer did more to mold that idea of authorship than Benjamin Franklin. Judith Shakespeare could not reconcile a life of the mind with the life of a mother. Neither could Virginia Woolf.

The facts of Jane Franklins life are hard to come by. Her obscurity is matched only by her brothers fame. If he meant to be Everyman, she is everyone else. Most of what she wrote is lostthe first letter in her hand to survive is one she wrote when she was forty-five years oldand what scant record of her life is left has been saved only because she was Benjamin Franklins sister.

But Jane Franklin is not a figment of my imagination. She was flesh and blood and milk and tears. Her brother ran away and broke their fathers heart; she would not, could not. She never gave herself that much rope. She didnt kill herself one winters night. She never gave herself that kind of rope, either. She had too many people to look after. She never left anyone behind. She hardly ever left the house. She didnt have a room of her own until she was sixty-nine years old. I write now in my own litle chamber& nobod up in the house near me to Desturb me, she wrote, delighted. She was very happy to have it, but not having that room sooner isnt why she didnt write more or better.