Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him,...
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From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. Lepore’s life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780307958341 (0307958345)
Publish date: October 1st 2013
Publisher: Knopf
Pages no: 464
Edition language: English
Writing a history, much less a biography, from admittedly scant secondary sources has got to be hard. And trying to follow the vogue of making the narrative flow in as fiction-like a manner at the time has got to be doubly difficult. It took me a bit to get into Jill Lepore's biography of Jane F...
In a way I received more than I wanted from this book and less than I expected. So little is known about Ben Franklin's sister that the author had to use quite a bit of filler and off topic information. The whole history in England, of the beginnings of the family and pf course how the family sprea...
Jill Lepore is terribly frustrating to me, because if you look at her bibliography it seems that she was put on this earth specifically to write books for me to read and yet every time I read something she's written I feel a tiny bit let down. I really did want to love this book, and I think that ...
I first learned about Jane “Jenny” Franklin in an earlier book by Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes, and though there isn’t more than a few pages on her I was so moved and taken by her story that it’s my strongest memory of that book and I was left wanting to know more. Jill Lepore’s mother mus...