An Ordinary Woman

In recent times, many historians of early America have struggled valiantly to capture and describe the lived lives of ordinary people. Some have been extraordinarily successful in their efforts to give readers a lens through which to view the often-harsh reality that the vast majority of England’s colonists faced every day. Their task, however, has never been easy. Historians who write about quiet and obscure men and women must often read between the lines as they piece together tiny scraps of scattered details in an effort to create a coherent and meaningful story. And, often as not, those “lines” do not even exist. Many early Americans were illiterate. Even the words of those who could and did write seldom survived the ravages of time. Recipients of a letter from Benjamin Franklin, for instance, might treasure his missive, carefully preserving it and handing it down from one generation to the next. Very few bothered to keep a note from Jane Mecom, Benjamin Franklin’s sister. Mecom wrote countless missives, especially to her older brother. But she was forty-five years old before Benjamin’s wife Deborah finally bothered to preserve just one of her sister-in-law’s letters. Most of those letters have simply vanished. Thus anyone attempting to write a scholarly biography of Jane Mecom faces huge, some might say insuperable, obstacles.

Jill Lepore has elected to ignore those obstacles in part by approaching her subject from a unique perspective. If, she says, we assume that, fully to understand any age, we must know something about the lives of the obscure and ordinary as well as about the elite and well connected, then we have to devise new ways of looking at the past. “What would it mean,” Lepore asks, “to write the history of an age not only from what has been saved but also from what has been lost?” (p. 242). If we confine ourselves to the documentary evidence, she insists, we will be “powerless” (p. 240); we will have to give up before we even start. But if we adopt the creative approach of the novelist, we might succeed where traditional historians have failed. Samuel Richardson, the creator of Pamela, argued that fiction is a “kind of truth” (p. 239). That being the case, Lepore argues, there are two kinds of histories. There is “a history based in fact (whose truth is founded in documentary evidence) and history based in fiction (whose truth is founded in human nature)” (p. 240). It is, after all, impossible truly to “know” anyone based on the documentary record, no matter how rich that record might be. Even historians who have an abundance of facts at their disposal must still arrange, shape, and analyze the written record. They still are confronted with silences. Thus, the end result of all biography is ultimately a kind of fiction.

Lepore’s biography is clearly a labor of love. If it is both thin and extremely dated historiographically, its use of the primary sources is intriguing and imaginative. Beautifully written, almost poetic, even its form is evocative. The book’s short chapters, piled one upon the other in more-or-less chronological order, reflect the rhythm of women’s lives in the eighteenth century. Women like Jane were consumed by lots of little tasks; they were constantly interrupted; they enjoyed no long periods of time to pursue a single line of thought in quiet isolation. If they were born, grew old, and died, they experienced little sense of progress. Each day seemed much like all the others.

Lepore explores both the silences and the sparse written record that Jane Mecom left behind. Some “facts” are readily discernable, available to anyone who relies on traditional sources. And most of those facts depict a woman whose life was truly ordinary. Jane was the youngest of seventeen children born to Josiah Franklin. (Benjamin was Josiah’s youngest son.) She married very young; she was fifteen when she wed...