"I Read as much as I Dare" confided Jane Franklin to her brother Benjamin. I've been eyeing Jill Lepore's Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin since it came out in hardcover. A while back I invested in the paperback as it seemed like something worth owning and now that I have started reading I have confirmed that that is indeed the case. It is not terribly long, but I will be reading it slowly--both by choice and not. It is filled with all sorts of interesting bits about Jenny and Benny and life in America ca.1700 as well as (and maybe most importantly) all kinds of wonderful bookishness. So I want to savor what I am reading as it is so enjoyable. But like everything else in life at the moment, I seem to be reading really slowly. I might just be able to squeeze in this last (of so very few this year) nonfiction read before the year ends.
Not much is known (or rather remains) about Jane Franklin, Benjamin's youngest and most beloved sibling. But the fact that she was the sister of such a famous man means there is a little that remains about her life. Like so many others who came before she would have fallen into obscurity for sure otherwise. She led a mostly typical life for a woman of her age and station but she was an inveterate reader like her brother. The book, it seems is as much about Benjamin as Jane but it seems fitting considering how close the two were.
It would seem that Jane Franklin was named after another famous Jane, the Nine Days' Queen Lady Jane Grey. How fitting that Lady Jane was such a woman of learning. Grandniece of Henry VIII she could read the Old Testament in Hebrew and Plato in Greek. When asked by her tutor how she came to such deep knowledge of things?
"I will tell you," she obliged: when she was in the company of other than books, she said, "I thinke my selfe in hell."
Jane Franklin was destined for a far less illustrious (and surely safer) life than Lady Jane. She never left home, never learned to spell, became a wife and other, and a widow. She kept up a lifelong correspondence with her (very progressive) brother Benjamin. While he went off to do grand things, see the world and make history, she lived the life that was expected of her.
"While Benny was improving his writing by arguing about the education of girls (you'll be pleased to note he was all for it!), Jenny was at home, boiling soap and stitching. Quietly, with what time she could find, she did more. She once confided to her brother, "I Read as much as I Dare."
I like her. And I like Benjamin, too, and look forward to learning more about both. Lepore compares and contrasts sister to brother but also the pair or Jane alone to others, women, of that same era. Like Jane Colman, a contemporary with a much different life. Jane Colman was a minister's daughter who had the great good fortune of being allowed to not only learn and study but was taught and tested by her father. She knew her letters before she was two and could recite psalms before she was five, could write at six, composed hymns by age eleven and soon thereafter was writing poetry and essays. Jane Franklin's education was nothing like that of Jane Colman's, but for all that she was not unhappy.
I want to know more about Jane Franklin and so onwards in the book, but these first few introductory chapters were a fine enough teaser for me. Just the sort of nonfiction I love to read--interesting and engaging. I'll never remember all the details (what mostly slows me down in reading nonfiction--trying to absorb it all), so I might share those bits most interesting to me along the way.
She might not have led the life of adventure like that of her brother Benjamin, but I bet it was in its own way just as interesting!