Book of Ages by Jill Lepore Page B

Franklin Mecom
WF
William Franklin
WTF
William Temple Franklin
Archives
AAS
American Antiquarian Society
APS
American Philosophical Society
HSP
Historical Society of Pennsylvania
LCP
Library Company of Philadelphia
LC
Library of Congress
Mass. Arch.
Massachusetts Archives
MFA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
MHS
Massachusetts Historical Society
NEHGS
New England Historic Genealogical Society
NHARL
Nantucket Historical Association Research Library
Princeton
Firestone Library, Princeton University
Rosenbach
Rosenbach Museum and Library
SCHS
South Carolina Historical Society
Thayer
Thayer Memorial Library, Lancaster, Massachusetts
Yale
Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University
Editions of Franklin’s Writings
BF,
Autobiography
Benjamin Franklin,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: An Authoritative Text,
ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: Norton, 1986).
Duane,
Letters
William Duane, ed.,
Letters to Benjamin Franklin from his Family and Friends, 1750–1790
(New York: Richardson, 1859).
Duane,
Works
William Duane, ed.,
The Works of Dr. Benjamin Franklin
(Philadelphia: W. Duane, 1808–18).
PBF
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin,
ed. Leonard Labaree et al., 40 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–2011).
Roelker,
BR and CRG
William Greene Roelker, ed.,
Benjamin Franklin and Catharine Ray Greene: Their Correspondence: 1755–1790
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1949).
Smyth,
Writings
Albert Henry Smyth, ed.,
The Writings of Benjamin Franklin.
New York: Macmillan, 1905.
Sparks,
Familiar Letters
Jared Sparks, ed.,
A Collection of the Familiar Letters and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Franklin
(Boston: C. Bowen, 1833).
Sparks,
Works
Jared Sparks, ed.,
The Works of Benjamin Franklin
(Boston: Tappan and Whittemore, 1836–40).
Van Doren,
Letters
Carl Van Doren, ed.,
The Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950).
PREFACE
       1.   JFM thinking of her brother as her “Second Self” is mentioned in CRG to BF, Warwick, RI, June 24, 1781. Similarly, in a letter to JFM, CRG referred to Franklin as “your other Self.” CRG to JFM, June 21, 1776. The likeness between Jane and Benjamin Franklin has not gone unobserved. Jared Sparks, one of Franklin’s earliest biographers, wrote of Jane, “She was remarkable for her strength of mind and character, her good sense and practical views of life, resembling in these respects, more than any others of the family, her brother Benjamin” (editorial comment in Sparks,
Works,
7:515). Or as JFM’s biographer Carl Van Doren put it, “She was the only one of the many Franklins who can be compared with him” (
Letters
, 3). The sole biography of JFM is Carl Van Doren,
Jane Mecom, the Favorite Sister of Benjamin Franklin: Her Life Here First Fully Narrated from Their Entire Surviving Correspondence
(New York: Viking, 1950). But see also a brilliant and landmark essay by Anne Firor Scott in
Making the Invisible Woman Visible
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 3–13. And see Jeremy A. Stern, “Jane Franklin Mecom: A Boston Woman in Revolutionary Times,”
Early American Studies
4 (2006): 147–91. JFM is sometimes included in biographical encyclopedias—e.g.,
American National Biography, Notable American Women,
and Carole Chandler Waldrup,
More Colonial Women: Twenty-five Pioneers of Early America
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004).
       2.   There is a substantial amount of scholarly literature onwomen and autobiography. Some scholars have argued that autobiography, a genre that took its recognizably modern form in the eighteenth century, was a masculine form of writing. Others insist that to see autobiography this way is to recapitulate the canon’s own bias;these scholars generally argue that other forms of women’s “life writing,” including diaries, letters, conversion narratives, and even family records like JFM’s “Book of Ages,” need to be counted as “autobiography.” See