On closer inspection, not such a plain Jane

Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - 19:20 in Psychology & Sociology

As a girl growing up on Franklin Street in Worcester, Jill Lepore learned about Benjamin Franklin, a Founding Father and the original jack-of-all-trades, but she certainly never suspected she’d someday be mired in the life of his nonfamous sibling, Jane. Jenny, he called her. Jenny called him Benny. “He loved no one longer,” said Lepore. “She loved no one better.” In her latest work, “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin,” Lepore, a professor of U.S. history at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, brings Jane and her story out of history’s fog and into the open. In Franklin’s day, schooling was not for girls. They learned to sew, then they married, gave birth, and died. Women were not taught to write, and those who could read were encouraged to read only “the Bible,” said Lepore, “to be closer to God.” “Jane Franklin did learn how to read,”...

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