Monday, April 25, 2011

Poor Jane's Almanac



Jill Lepore has written an interesting article on the sister of Benjamin Franklin, Jane Mecom. It has shades of Virginia Woolf's piece on Shakespeare's imaginary sister and why she would never have become famous even with the same talents, but it is even more cleverly linked to the current focus on the Founding Fathers and the idea that the world then was the perfect one, the world into which we should all return, that giving money to the poor is bad for their morals and morale and that letting the rich keep their money is, for some reason, good for their morals and morale.