She married at the age of 15, young even for that time. While her brother traversed the Atlantic, Jane spent most of her life in their native Boston. In idiosyncratically spelled missives, she observed the colonies and Britain breaking apart and wrote to Franklin: “For my Part I wish we had Let alone strife before it was medled with. Over time, as Lepore is delighted to point out, Jane started to come more into her own, departing from the strictly personal and daring to offer her brother opinions on political matters. She strained to form the letters of her name.” The contrast with her brother could not have been more stark: “He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. “Her education was slight, her intellect stunted, her vantage provincial, her views narrow,” Lepore writes. Yet she serves a similar ideological purpose. By contrast, Jane Franklin is not - for the most part - a product of Lepore’s imagination. Lepore evokes Virginia Woolf’s invention of Judith Shakespeare, an imaginary sister to William Shakespeare, who represented the crushing effects of gender discrimination on female creativity. If he meant to be Everyman, she is everyone else.” “Her obscurity is matched only by her brother’s fame. “The facts of Jane Franklin’s life are hard to come by,” Lepore writes, confessing at one point that she was so discouraged that she almost renounced the project. The letters we do have - hers to her brother and his to her - survive mostly because she was Ben Franklin’s sister. Reflecting Jane Franklin’s absence from the public sphere, the evidence of her life is scanty and includes not a single letter she wrote before the age of 45 (Lepore’s account of her early years is mostly inspired guesswork, based on recollections in later letters and what is known of the typical lives of the young in the period).

Book of ages lepore