In 1710, three of five women in New England could not even sign their names. Women were taught to stitch men to write. Their trajectories could not have been more different, and the difference, Lepore contends, derived from gender.
Of Jane's 10 children, one daughter survived one of Franklin's sons, born out of wedlock, became governor of the colony of New Jersey. She married at age 15, perhaps because she was pregnant at the time he never married (his common-law wife Deborah gave birth twice, but only their daughter lived to adulthood). Hers was a life of drudgery in dark and dank four-room houses his became a life of letters and privilege among the important politicians and literati of America and Europe. He was the most important person in her life she was the most constant in his. Yet, Lepore contends, "a history of the life and opinions of Jane Franklin offers, along the way, a wholly new reading of the life and opinions of her brother," and his sister was "his other half." When he wrote his autobiography (Lepore calls it "the most famous thing ever written by the most famous American who had ever lived"), he left her out. Whereas Franklin's surviving corpus is prodigious and minutely preserved in archives, now printed and reprinted and available online, none of Jane's early letters has surfaced before the age of 45, save for the gem of a document that she thought to construct, a tiny hand-made booklet of 16 pages in which she recorded the births and deaths of her children and that she called her "Book of Ages." The challenge to writing this life story is the greater because, like most women in the past, very few written sources survive to document Jane's life. In this beautifully written double biography, Lepore brings into focus not just the life of Jane Franklin Mecom, alongside that of her brother, but illuminates the dynamic era through which they lived and gives us a birds'-eye view of history from the vantage point of a powerless woman who grew up in a Boston family alongside one of the 18th century's greatest authors, entrepreneurs, scientists and statesmen.
0 kommentar(er)
