Lady Franklin's Revenge

Description

The remarkable life of one of Britain's greatest female explorers Born into a wealthy London family in late-eighteenth-century England, Jane Griffin enjoyed nothing like the opportunities available to men of her class. And yet she became a world traveller, ranging far off the beaten path of Grand-Tour Europe to explore Russia, Greece, the Holy Land and northern Africa. She rode a donkey into Nazareth, sailed a rat-infested boat up the Nile River, and, at age of seventy, circumnavigated the globe in rough sailing ships. Jane married Captain John Franklin at thirty-six. She helped him seize the opportunity of a lifetime - leadership of a Royal Navy expedition destined, supposedly, to solve the final riddle of the Northwest Passage. After Franklin disappeared into the Arctic, she badgered the Admiralty into dispatching dozens of ships to locate him; she financed voyages through public subscription, paid for others out of her own pocket, and inspired even the president of the United States to contribute to the search. In 1854, when explorer John Rae returned from the Arctic with news that the final survivors of the Franklin expedition, while starving to death, had degenerated into cannibalism, Jane enlisted the celebrated Charles Dickens to repudiate him. She then sent Leopold McClintock to the area Rae had specified, and he brought back the evidence she sought, exonerating Franklin personally and opening the way to her creation of a legend.

Ken McGoogan is a Canadian writer - historian, biographer, novelist and journalist. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed bestseller Fatal Passage, about Scottish Arctic adventurer John Rae, which won the Writers' Trust of Canada Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the Canadian Authors' Association History Award and the Grant MacEwan Award. It also won a US Christopher Award as a work of artistic excellence that 'affirms the highest values of the human spirit'. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed Ancient Mariner, a biography of the British explorer Samuel Hearne. He lives with his family in Toronto, Canada.

An exhaustive and scrupulously researched biography. -- Sara Wheeler * The Times * McGoogan's sharp insight has portrayed a deliciously satisfying portrait. * BBC History Magazine * 'Ken McGoogan has written a scrupulous, surprising, illuminating and, dare one say it, affectionate biography of a woman whose life as a diarist, traveller and social reformer will come to surpass many of her better-known contemporaries. A woman who, in her vigorous and relentless quest for the truth concerning the fate of her husband and his search for the Northwest Passage, has done considerably more to map and make known the kaleidoscopic maze of the Canadian Arctic than a boatload of less well equipped adventurers' -- Robert Edric Detailed, thorough and compulsive * Mail on Sunday * This well-written, fast-paced book presents a fascinating picture not only of this iconic widow but also of the age itself. -- THE GOOD BOOK GUIDE, Jan07