She was bred to bookery and cookery, needle and thread. That Jane Franklin learned to write as well as she did was a twist of fate: she was her brother’s sister. To Book’ry, Cook’ry, Thimble, Needle, Thread.3 I tell thee Wife, once more, I’ll have her bred To scrub, to rub, to earn and not to spend, To knit, to spin, to sew, to make or mend, To roast, to toast, to boil and mix a Pudding. Teach her what’s useful, how to shun deluding, That God may keep her from the Devils Snares Make her expert and ready at her Prayers, That she may’nt mispronounce God’s People, Popel, Prithee, good Madam, let her first be able,

What more could she study? A Boston newspaper printed “A Dialogue between a thriving Tradesman and his Wife about the Education of Their Daughter.” The wife wishes to send the girl to school. She learned to dye.1 She helped her father in the shop, doing the work that her brother hated, “cutting Wick for the Candles, filling the Dipping Mold, and the Molds for cast Candles.”2

She learned to bake and to roast, to mend and to scrub. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. 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. 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. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve.īenjamin 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. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. 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.

Book of ages by jill lepore