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.