A Book for the Ages

Jill Lepore's Book of Ages is a great way to end the semester.  Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life before the reader's very eyes.  Lepore does a fantastic job of looking at Franklin's personal life and the way that she is caught up in a web of forces much larger than herself, such as the growing influence of paper currency.  Lepore doesn't just use Franklin's life as a starting block to jump into another contemporaneous event, but goes to show the way these forces affected the person central to this microhistory's keyhole, Jane Franklin.  One not only learns about the societal customs that affected all aspects of women's life, especially education, but one gets to see these customs at work on the ground level, influencing people in the flesh.  Reading this book has really influenced the way in which I want to take my own paper.  Lepore's style not only brings the Franklins to life, but also entices the reader by portraying the setting in which our characters are found as both exciting and troubling.  One example of Lepore's writing that I intend to use as inspiration for my own project is the way in which she looks at Jane's surroundings and analyzes the role that debt played in the changing economy.  War veterans were being brought to court over debts that they hadn't paid.  Nadezhda Mandelstam, the central figure in my own microhistory, discusses the way that Stalin's decision to enforce collectivization led to dearth when it came to food throughout the Soviet Union.  I hope to be able to look at the relationship between my own central figure and the larger forces at work with at least some small degree of the success that Lepore has put on display.

The Wonderfully Readable Results of Loving Too Much

In 2001, twelve years before she published Book of Ages, Jill Lepore wrote an article for the Journal of American History about “Historians Who Love Too Much.” When we reviewed that article during our first week of class, we talked about the trap Lepore described as a hazard for historians who write biographies and microhistories – getting too close to the subject, losing objectivity, becoming blind to the parts of the story that don’t conform to the ideal. In a 2013 article for The New Yorker called The Prodigal Daughter, Lepore removes any doubt that she loved Jane Franklin Mecom too much. She was writing about Jane at the behest of her own mother, then in her eighties, destined to die before the book was finished.

Book of Ages was the perfect book to wrap up this course. It challenges the expectations of historical writing, whether microhistory, biography, or other conventions. It defies categorization. Lepore herself argued, in discussing her methods, that Jane Franklin Mecom’s life does not fit neatly into any of the standard conventions of historical writing – history, biography, autobiography, or fiction (pg. 270). She wove together elements of all these genres, and more. Is it a microhistory? To some extent, it fits the criteria we have established: Lepore uses Jane’s life to examine the larger historical context of 18^th century America, writing in exceptional narrative prose, illuminating an otherwise unknown side of a well-known story. But Book of Ages is something different. The San Francisco Chronicle called it a “double biography,” telling the stories of both Jane and her famous brother, Benjamin Franklin. But the source material for Jane’s early life is sparse, so Lepore uses unconventional methods to fill in the gaps, borrowing quotes from Jane’s later writings, following tangents to explore the Franklin ancestry back to its earliest records in England, and even incorporating brief biographical sketches of other famous Janes (Jane Grey and Jane Austen), influential authors of the 18^th century, and occasionally people who had little or no direct correlation to the subject of the book. It is not so much a biography or a history as a book about living in Boston and Philadelphia in Franklin’s time, with content drawn equally from records, imagination, and interpolation.

The bottom line is that Jill Lepore has, through her unique methodology, crafted a brilliant book that is informative, imaginative, and a joy to read. It may or may not be a microhistory, and although that question may have some relevance in our current class, the real strength of Lepore’s work is that it proves that a well-written book does not need to fit into any predefined genre.

The Amazing Ben 'n Jen Considered

It seems easy to view Jill Lepore's Book of Ages as a biography, particularly when she calls it a biography (although one that she says "borrows from the conventions of fiction").  (P. 269).  But her tipoff about fiction is only one element that seems to also make the book a microhistory.  Others include, for example, the use of a personal, discreet event (the sibling relationship of Franklin and Mecom) as a lens on a number of larger issues in the 18th century: issues of women, poverty, debtors, lunatics, medicine, politics, fame, the rise from humble origins, and even history.  It also uses letters as its primary source, a microhistory hallmark.  Additionally, it focuses (at least partially) on the life of an "obscure" person.  Perhaps the moral of this book, and our class, is that the definition of a microhistory can cover an extremely broad spectrum of "conventions of different kinds of writing about lives."  (P. 270).