Lady Franklin’s Revenge

Ken McGoogan

HarperCollins

In April 2008, I had one of my semi-regular din­ner dates with a seventy-two-year-old friend who was an avid canoeist and hiker. As we dined on pasta and drank red wine, he raved about Lady Franklin’s Revenge by Ken McGoogan (HarperCollins). He glee­fully recounted Lady F’s exploits and described her as com­pelling and intel­li­gent; I can’t remem­ber if he said manip­u­la­tive. A few weeks later I hap­pened to wan­der through the aisles of the second-hand book­store in town, and there it was. I bought Revenge and began my edu­ca­tion in how to manip­u­late his­tory and main­tain your hon­our as a Victorian lady. McGoogan’s book is an in-depth account of a detail-oriented, uncom­pro­mis­ing, highly moti­vated and intel­li­gent woman. The adven­ture that was Lady and Sir John Franklin’s part­ner­ship is rife with love, betrayal, adven­ture and intrigue. Jane Griffin (Lady F) met John Franklin long after he’d earned his rep­u­ta­tion as an Arctic explorer, and she was thirty-six when they mar­ried. Through her per­sua­sive­ness and soci­etal con­nec­tions, she manoeu­vred him into the posi­tion of lieutenant-governor of Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land, as it was known), pushed him into his final Arctic explo­ration and, finally, ele­vated him to the sta­tus of revered dis­cov­erer of the Northwest Passage — all the while expand­ing her sta­tus and influ­ence. She was an aris­to­crat, com­fort­able and well edu­cated — both for­mally and infor­mally, through her world trav­els. This would not have been pos­si­ble with­out her wealth, but her gump­tion would have galled most Victorian men — she went where she wanted, when she wanted. Bottom line: Sir John Franklin did not dis­cover the Northwest Passage, but Lady Franklin con­vinced an awful lot of peo­ple that he did. How she did it is an adven­ture story of its own.