A sporadic correspondence at first, the two apparently wrote regularly after her children were grown and after Franklin’s reputation and renown were well-established. Apparently she was a prolific letter-writer, too, although none survives from her early years, Details of her early life appear in her “Book of Ages,” a diary that enumerated births and deaths, a four-page archive of children born and buried. Pregnant at the age of fifteen, mother of twelve, married to a dead-beat husband, caretaker of her aging parents, caregiver as well to countless grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Jane struggled to tend to everyone’s well-being.
Franklin’s life is well-known Jane’s is not. The two outlived their siblings, all fifteen of them. Jane was Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister. At the same time, Lepore has drawn a graphic picture of American life in late eighteenth-century Boston. Jill Lepore, by digging deeply into Franklin family letters and relevant historic documents, has reconstructed the life of Jane Franklin Mecom. So, too, the real-life sister of Benjamin Franklin was fated to follow a very different path than the one her famous brother took. Judith Shakespeare, equally as bright as William and equally gifted, was doomed by her gender and by her culture’s expectations of a woman’s lot in life. Virginia Woolf, writing A Room of One’s Own, invented a sister for Shakespeare. Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
0 kommentar(er)
