Making use of an amazing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world - a world usually lost to history. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man his sister spent her life caring for her children. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Perhaps as interesting as the facts he reveals and the opinions he records about Dickens and George Eliot, politics and the civil service are the judgments he passes on his own character.įrom one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin' s youngest sister and a history of history itself.

Trollope looks back on his life with satisfaction. His efforts resulted in over sixty books, a sizable fortune, and fame, and his autobiography. and disciplined himself to write 250 words every fifteen minutes has become part of literary legend. How he paid his groom to wake him every morning at 5:30 a.m.

But he had inherited his mother's determination, and managed later to carve out a successful career in the General Post Office while devoting every spare moment to writing. He was the victim of vicious bullying at Harrow and Winchester. Trollope was born in 1815, the product of a formidable mother and a tragically unsuccessful father who was socially ambitious for his sons. But he was also the author of one of the most fascinating autobiographies of the nineteenth century. Anthony Trollope is most famous for his portrait of the professional and landed classes of Victorian England, especially in his Palliser and Barsetshire novels.

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