“What would it mean to write the history of an age not only from what has been saved but also from what has been lost?” asks Jill Lepore in “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin.” It’s a worthy question, one that seeks to recover the experiences of the marginalized and powerless in defiance of the Great Man theory that continues to haunt America’s historical imagination, especially where Founding Fathers are concerned. Pulling an ordinary woman’s life out from under the shadow of her famous brother, Benjamin Franklin, Lepore writes from a perspective that is vivid, imaginative and occasionally compelling. Ultimately, however, the “Book of Ages” never surmounts the obstacles inherent in the project, and the result is a microhistory of the Revolutionary era that falls significantly short of revolutionary.
Of Jane Franklin, born seven years after Ben, Lepore writes, “Her obscurity was only matched by her brother’s fame.” Jane married at 15, bore 12 children and died at 82, four years after the death of the brother she called her “Second Self.” It wasn’t a happy life. Of her offspring, only four survived past their 30th birthdays, and she spent much of her life nursing sick children and relations. Two of her sons were mentally unstable; one died a raving lunatic. Her husband, Edward Mecom, was a singularly unsuccessful man who racked up massive debts. When he landed in debtor’s prison, Jane used every respectable means a woman had to support herself and her family, including taking boarders, trimming hats and making soap from a family recipe.
Well into her 70s, Jane was still caring for her great-grandchildren. It’s no wonder she counted her correspondence with Ben as one of the greatest pleasures of her life. She didn’t have many.
Lepore, a history professor at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, is at her best when performing virtuosic close readings of the correspondence between “Benny and Jenny” that continued throughout much of their adult lives. Jane’s extremely poor spelling, grammar and punctuation make Lepore’s job harder, but, as she says in an author’s note upfront, “Spelling is part of the story,” and retaining the errors proves a canny choice.
Under Lepore’s careful exegesis, Jane’s letters give the impression of a sharp wit clouded over by fatigue and often reduced to mere sarcasm by a life at once chaotic and constricted. Jane’s rough, gossipy letters make a telling contrast to Ben’s sparkling missives, full of winding metaphors and sophisticated jokes. It is a contrast made even more heartbreaking by her frequent pleas, during his long stretches of silence, to write more often.
But alas, the longest silence of all belongs to Jane: Not a single letter she wrote before age 45 survives. The titular “Book of Ages” does little to fill in the gap: It is a small, homemade book of 16 stitched-together pages in which Jane recorded only the family’s birth dates and death dates, adding nothing at all of her daily life, much less the “opinions” hinted at in the book’s subtitle. With no other letters or journals to draw from, Jane’s youth and middle age must be inferred from the bare facts and from Ben’s letters to her.
Lepore takes some striking risks as a writer and historian to compensate for the paucity of sources, but not all of them pay off, especially in the first half of the book, where the historical record is virtually nonexistent. In the early chapters, Lepore frequently interrupts the historical narrative with ponderous bouts of parataxis, often in stand-alone paragraphs: “Behold the historian. His hand holds a pen. His eye lingers on the past.” Whether you find these elliptical passages enlightening or merely annoying will determine much of your enjoyment of the book, but either way, their intoned repetition often obscures the speculative nature of the arguments in the first part of the book.
Even when Lepore’s guesses are plausible, their fragile support often snaps under the weight of overblown rhetoric. For example, speculating on why Jane married Mecom at 15, Lepore observes that such early, disadvantageous marriages were often the result of unplanned pregnancy. Since the couple did not have a child until two years later, Lepore notes that “If [Jane] was pregnant when she married, she either miscarried or gave birth to a baby born dead.” As speculations go, this is poignant. The next sentence, however, veers into sheer melodrama: “And then she might have stared out across the water in the harbor and known that she had married a wastrel for naught.”
If “wastrel for naught” is a problem, so is “might have,” which appears so often in the first half of the book as to make readers question, occasionally, Lepore’s assertion in the preface that “Jane is not a figment of my imagination.” Following her observation that Ben Franklin printed “Pamela” at his own expense and gave a copy to his daughter, Lepore concludes, “Franklin printed ‘Pamela,’ he admired it, and he liked to give it to women whose opinions he wished to mold. Likely, he gave a copy to Jane. What must she have thought of it?” In three sentences, Lepore moves from possibility (“he liked to give it to women”) to probability (“Likely, he gave a copy to Jane”) to certitude (“What must she have thought of it?” not “What might she have thought of it?”). Follow the endnote, and you will find there is no more evidence that Jane looked upon Samuel Richardson’s novel than there is of her thoughts when she was looking out the window.
Perhaps most disturbing is Lepore’s practice, which she explains in an appendix, of quoting from Jane’s late-life letters in the chapters about Jane’s early years. Although Lepore mentions the problem of lost letters briefly in the preface, she does not inform the reader of this creative solution; instead these decontextualized fragments buried within otherwise straightforwardly chronological chapters bear the weight of argument.
In a typical example, in a chapter called “Book’ry, Cook’ry” that compares Jane’s childhood education (or lack thereof) with Ben’s, Lepore ends the chapter by noting that “While Benny was improving his writing by arguing about the education of girls, Jenny was at home, boiling soap and sitting.” So far, so ironic. However, she follows this observation by stating, “Quietly, with what time she could find, she did more. She once confided to her brother, ‘I Read as much as I Dare.'” This is the last line of the chapter; it clearly implies that Jane tried to pursue reading in her spare moments as a child, and, more obliquely, that she feared reprimand for it. Should a careful reader check the endnote, however, she will find that the last statement was made when Jane was 62.
To use something Jane said at 62 to imply that she pursued reading as a child of 10 is more than creative; it’s misleading. “I mean no sleight of hand,” Lepore insists in the appendix on method. “I mean only to allow the reader to enjoy Jane’s company.” But even a generous reader must wonder why such an important note on method is buried at the back of the book, rather than acknowledged in an introduction or preface.
Making history out of what is lost is incredibly challenging. For a woman of Jane’s time to have left a substantive record of her individual life behind, she almost would have had to be atypical. A social history of women in the colonies pieced together from many ordinary women’s letters, journals and “books of ages” might achieve accuracy of representation through breadth, not depth. This would, of course, shift the weight of the narrative away from any one woman’s life, which would deprive the reader (and author) of a subject with whom to identify. Beyond losing the pleasures of biography, this approach risks lumping the marginalized into an undifferentiated mass, robbing them of the dignity of individual lives.
Yet Lepore’s book is a curiously unsatisfying attempt to resolve this dilemma. The story borrows copiously from its context, citing letters and writings of Jane Colman, Anne Bradstreet, Hester Thrale and other female “exceptions,” as Lepore calls them. But rather than bringing the slender record to life, as in Laura Ulrich’s seminal microhistory “A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812,” the context sometimes seems to swallow the subject.
At the end of the day, Jane Franklin herself is something of an exception; her few remaining letters only survive because of her proximity to Ben. With some jacket blurbs praising the book for its new insights on the founding brother, it’s not hard to see traces of the Great Man narrative living on in the microhistory. Lepore’s book stands as valiant testimony to the tragic erasure of women in Jane’s time. But perhaps there are times when too much has been lost, and all we can do is mourn.
Amy Gentry is a writer, performer and blogger.
“Book of Ages”
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By Jill Lepore, Knopf, 464 pages, $27.95