Eleanor Anne Porden

Mary Ann Flaxman : Portrait of Eleanor Anne Porden, oil on canvas

Eleanor Anne Porden (born July 14, 1795 in London , † February 22, 1825 ; married Eleanor Anne Franklin ) was an English poet and the first wife of the polar explorer John Franklin .

Life

Eleanor Anne Porden was the younger surviving daughter of the architect William Porden and his wife Mary. Another daughter and son of the couple died in infancy. Eleanor Porden was tutored by private tutors and attracted attention early on with her talent for writing. She attended courses and lectures in chemistry , geology , natural history and botany at the Royal Institution in London. At sixteen she wrote her first major work, The Veils; or the Triumph of Constancy , a romantic poem in six books that was not published until 1815.

In 1818 she met her future husband John Franklin just before his first polar expedition and was thus inspired to write the short poem The Arctic Expeditions . During Franklin's absence, she wrote the epic poem in sixteen books, Cœur de Lion, or The Third Crusade, on Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade , published in 1822. In the same year John Franklin returned to England. The two married in August 1823.

Their daughter Eleanor Isabella was born in June 1824. The pregnancy of Eleanor Franklin, who suffered from tuberculosis, worsened . She died in February 1825 at the age of 29, a few days after John Franklin set out on his second Arctic expedition.

Web links

• The veils; or the Triumph of Constancy. Electronic Edition