He taught her to write, and then he ran away from home: “When he left, the lessons ended.” She was the youngest of 17 her brother Benjamin, whom she adored, was six years older. For more than half her life, she lived and labored in the house where she was born, and she was pregnant half of that time: 13 times in 20 years. Like all the women she knew, and almost all the women in her world, Jane Franklin “lived a life of confinement,” literally and figuratively. Instead, she bled, and tied rags between her legs.” Yet from a few elusive lines in the letters Benjamin wrote back, and from her deep and creative research into the world the Franklins were born into, Lepore gives us a woman in the flesh, with no hints and hedges about what she must, or might, have felt: “She never put on pants. Her brother does not mention her in his autobiography, although they were devoted correspondents.
There is no record of anything Jane Franklin might have thought or felt in her youth.
Unlike many biographers who deploy fiction to quietly fill the gaps between facts, Lepore - a history professor at Harvard and a New Yorker staff writer - draws attention to what is missing from the story. Jane wrote the dates of birth and death of her family members in a “Book of Ages” that she stitched herself: “the remains of her remains,” as Lepore puts it. Jill Lepore’s luminous story of the life of Benjamin Franklin’s sister is stitched together from fragments and scraps, a life’s “remains” - a word with layers, meaning what is left of the physical body as well as a body of work: literature and descendants. The only reason we know anything at all about a Boston woman named Jane Mecom, who died in 1794 of “old age, & a Cold,” as it was reported in the church record, is that she was the beloved little sister of one of the most remarkable men in American history. A name - the satellite, feminine form of John, nickname Jenny - given again and again through the generations.
This is a story of many Janes, stretching in time from the Nine Days’ Queen, Lady Jane Grey, to Jane Austen.
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