Lady Franklins Revenge [Hardcover]

It must have been hugely frustrating for noted historical author Ken McGoogan to crack the spine of Pierre Berton's final work, 2004's Prisoners of the North, only to discover that Berton had devoted an entire chapter to England's Lady Jane Franklin in his otherwise male-dominated account of the Artic. While McGoogan's ardently researched tome Lady Franklin's Revenge is clearly the definitive work on the indomitable 19th-century woman and her peripatetic ways, Berton's offering presents two distinct advantages to the reader. It's snappier and it's shorter, thus avoiding the biggest hurdle facing McGoogan's book: his protagonist and her husband, the British explorer Sir John Franklin, were spectacularly unlikable people. The more we learn about them, the less agreeable they become. McGoogan concedes as much repeatedly. "Even sympathetic readers, such as ... Australian scholar Penny Russell, have admitted that 'it is not always easy to like' Lady Franklin," McGoogan writes. "Curious, brave, observant, articulate, and loyal, Jane could also be selfish, insensitive, and interfering. Like most upper-middle-class women of her time, she felt herself to be innately superior to the common run of humanity." That's putting it charitably. This, after all, was a woman who callously dumped her Aboriginal daughter-- adopted in an effort to "civilize" her--in a ramshackle state-run orphanage when she departed Australia. Broken and destitute, the girl was dead by age 21. Lady Franklin also advocated shaving the heads of female prisoners in Australia (then the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land) to further stigmatize them for their crimes, most of them petty. While some might argue that Lady Franklin's behaviour was consistent with her era, it was precisely her unwillingness to conform that paved the way to her most noted achievements, namely, traveling the world at a time when women didn't travel and tenaciously searching for her husband lost in the Artic, immortalizing him (rather unjustly) but opening the door to greater exploration there. Lady Franklin's Revenge is a thorough accounting of her life and legacy, but even the keenest and most forgiving reader might find the Lady herself a difficult companion for so long a journey. --Kim Hughes

With Lady Franklin’s Revenge, bestselling author KenMcGoogan (Fatal Passage, Ancient Mariner) delivers another pageturning biography that brings a remarkable historical figure vividly to life.Denied a role in Victorian England’s male-dominated society, Jane Franklin(1791–1875) took her revenge by seizing control of that most masculine ofpursuits, Arctic exploration, and shaping its history to her own ends.

Arguably the greatest woman traveller of the 19th century, LadyFranklin rode a donkey into Nazareth, sailed a rat-infested boat up the Nile,climbed mountains in Africa and the Holy Land, and, wearing petticoats, beat herway through the Tasmanian bush.

When Sir John Franklin, her husband, disappeared into the Arcticin 1845, she orchestrated an unprecedented 12-year search, contributing more tothe discovery of the North than any celebrated explorer. Having failed to rescuethe hapless Franklin, she turned failure into triumph by creating a legend.

Richly detailed, panoramic in scope, this biography of theunforgettable Jane Franklin is destined to become a classic.

KEN MCGOOGAN’s books include the national bestseller FatalPassage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer WhoDiscovered the Fate of Franklin. That work rewrote a crucial chapter inexploration history and won four awards: the Writers’ Trust of Canada Drainie-TaylorBiography Prize, the Canadian Authors Association History Award, the GrantMacEwan Author’s Award and a Christopher Award in the US. Ken McGoogan livesin Toronto.