It was just a matter of time, given the passages about Jane Franklin in Jill Lepore’s 2010 book The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History, that we’d get a full-length biography of Ben Franklin’s sister. It’s worth the wait, too, as Lepore—a Harvard professor who knows how to make strong narrative and interesting characters into exceptionally readable history—gives us insight into how very different life was in the time of America’s birth for
a woman easily as bright as her brother, but lacking the appropriate physiology.

Fortunately, Jane was as much a writer as her brother, though she suffered somewhat from lack of access to an education. That means her writing is much less stilted and beholden to propriety; she says what
she thinks, and frankly, she thinks pretty well. While Ben Franklin was out building a country, Jane was married off at 15 to a man she didn’t love. She had 12 children and the ‘Book of Ages’ in the title of Lepore’s history is the hand-stitched volume in which Jane recorded their births, lives, and deaths.

She struggled with poverty—her brother helped support her—and her only real claim to fame was being the sister of someone famous. But Lepore uses this (and she invokes Virginia Woolf’s famous essay, “Shakespeare’s Sister”) as a way to understand how women were swept out of the public sphere. In the end, we get an intriguing biography of an interesting woman—and we know a little bit more about her famous brother.