>>REVIEW
LADY FRANKLIN’S REVENGE: A TRUE STORY OF AMBITION, OBSESSION AND THE REMAKING OF ARCTIC HISTORY
Ken McGoogan
HarperCollins, 468 pp.
Most people today, asked if they can recall anything they’ve heard or read about the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, would at best reply that Franklin and some fellow sailors went looking for the fabled Northwest Passage and died in the process. And wasn’t there something about cannibalism?
Such cruel distillations hardly do justice to people who risked everything in that great, 19th-century era of northern exploration, but for anyone who cares to go looking, books and articles galore about Franklin are there to be found. And the truth is, Franklin’s fame was probably much greater for his going missing in 1845 than it would have been if he had survived and returned to Britain.
A much more interesting story is that of Lady Jane Franklin, the explorer’s widow. Author Ken McGoogan proves, in his exquisitely researched Lady Franklin’s Revenge, that this extraordinary Victorian woman greatly advanced knowledge of the Arctic because of her obsession with learning the fate of her husband and her willingness to blow the family fortune in the process.
In fact, her whole adult life was a case study in behind-the-scenes manipulation, from her strategic courtship of the widowed John Franklin to her guile in directing his role as the ill-fated governor of Tasmania, to his final – doomed – assignment in the Arctic.
When Franklin’s two ships failed to return, and friends urged Jane to accept him as lost, this strong-willed woman who had done her own share of risky travelling refused to listen. She had orchestrated his final adventure while knowing "he would depart at 59 years of age and grossly overweight," writes McGoogan. "But for her actions, Franklin would not now be lost in the Arctic. How then could she abandon the search?"
She financed key searches and persuaded individuals and organizations to pay for others, playing a pivotal role in five expeditions that added immensely to the knowledge of Arctic coastlines and tributaries.
McGoogan, in his third Arctic-related biography, tells this epic story as if it were a first-rate novel, while adding expansive notes, appendices and a bibliography. In the process, we learn a great deal about a woman who was a remarkable force at a time when women were supposed to know their place. Jane Franklin was consistently aware of the limits to which she could push her views, virtually always getting what she wanted for her husband – even decades after his death, when she continued to shape history’s view of the lost explorer.
A modern biography of Lady Franklin has been long overdue, but it was worth the wait. |
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