Author: Porden, Eleanor Anne
Biography:
PORDEN, Eleanor Anne later FRANKLIN (1795-1825: ODNB)
Porden was born in London at 55 Devonshire Street on 14 July 1795, a daughter of an eminent architect, William Porden (1754-1822), and his wife Mary Plowman (1755-1819). Educated by her father and by her father’s associate John Linnell Bond (1764-1837), she attended lectures at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street. She belonged to an intellectually and socially rarefied circle that included her close friends Elizabeth Appleton and Mary Russell Mitford (qq.v.) and members of the Flaxman and D’Israeli families. More than has hitherto been recognized, her writing career involved the publisher John Murray of Albemarle Street. Her connection to Murray was through a mutual family friend, Isaac D’Israeli (q.v.), and through her father’s and Bond’s acquaintance, Murray’s associate William Gifford (q.v.). Murray published her poems The Veils and The Arctic Expedition. She also offered Murray her nearly 15,000-line Cœur de Lion (Gifford supplied “friendly criticism” of the poem), but he declined to publish it. In response to his request, on 4 Jan. 1822 she had sent him the poem’s first four books. After fifteen days without a reply, she wrote to ask that he return her manuscript. The inspiration for her poem The Arctic Expedition was an 1818 tour of Sir John Ross’s ships Alexander and Isabella arranged by Murray and an article in his flagship journal, the QR (1817, 18:25, art. 11). The article’s author, Sir John Barrow, read and commented on her poem in manuscript. Reviews of her poems were mixed: MR (“lines are inharmonious”); Anti-Jacobin (“very high character”); Literary Gazette (“a great effort for a female pen”). On 19 Aug. 1823 (not 6 Aug. as in ODNB) at St Marylebone, Westminster, she married the explorer Sir John Franklin. Their only child, Eleanor, was born in 1824. Weakened in childbirth and agitated by her husband’s impending voyage to the Arctic, the tuberculosis she had contracted earlier worsened. She died on 22 Feb. 1825 in the house in which she was born. (ODNB 12 July 2023; GM [1816], 45-49; Bodleian Lib. Douce ms d.31, Eng. Lett. ms C288; John Murray Archive ms 42236; Derbyshire Record Office ms D8760; E. M. Gell, John Franklin’s Bride [1930]; A. Johns-Putra, “Eleanor Anne Porden’s Cœur de Lion (1822),” Women’s Writing, 19:3 [2012], 351-71) JC
Other Names:
- Miss Porden