Heroine or Hellcat?

Lady Franklin’s Revenge by award-winning Ken McGoogan is a brilliant and an infuriating book.

Brilliant: Revenge is a superbly written biography that achieves the status of a page turner through the skill of its author and the thrill of its background: Arctic history. The book’s subject is equally fascinating. Although she was born before the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), Jane Franklin grew to epitomize many aspects of upper-class Victorian womanhood, and yet she contradicted them as well. She was, perhaps, the best-travelled woman of an era when women abided at home. Ambitious without peer, she climbed very high on the ladder of success and status, all the while careful to half-hide in her husband’s shadow. Lady Franklin may well have been the most intelligent person at any given dinner party or any random drawing room in mid 19th-century London. She was certainly one of the most powerful, but always, of course, acting behind the scenes. McGoogan...