Eleanor Anne Porden was a British Romantic poet and the first wife of the explorer John Franklin.
Background
She was born in London, the younger surviving daughter of the architect William Porden and his wife Mary Plowman. (Another sister and brother had died in infancy) Her mother was an invalid, and after her older sister"s marriage, she nursed her from 1809 until her death in 1819.
Career
An intelligent young woman, educated privately at home, and interested in the arts and sciences, Porden attracted attention for her poetry from an early age. Her first major work, the allegorical The Veils. Or the Triumph of Constancy, was published in 1815, when she was just twenty - although she had written it at the age of sixteen.
She prefaced it with an introduction which gives a clear indication of her interests and education:
This inspired a short poem, The Arctic Expeditions.
During Franklin"s absence, she researched and wrote a historical epic poem, Cœur de Lion, or The Third Crusade. A poem, in sixteen books
This was published in two volumes in 1822, with a dedication to the king, George IV. Based on historical research, and also on mediaeval romances, it recounts the adventures of Richard I of England on the Third Crusade. Other prominent characters include Guy of Lusignan, Isabella of Jerusalem (portrayed as a femme fatale), and Conrad of Montferrat, whom she depicts as a flawed, tragic Byronic hero, in contrast with the unequivocally hostile treatment by her contemporary Walter Scott in The Talisman.
Indeed, despite such fanciful episodes, strongly influenced by Torquato Tasso, her poem has more historical content than Scott"s better-known novel.
Her sources included the works of Joseph François Michaud and Charles Mills. Also in 1822, her father died, and Franklin returned from the Arctic. She wrote to him six months before the wedding:
it was the pleasure of Heaven to bestow those talents on me, and it was my father"s pride to cultivate them to the utmost of his power.
I should therefore be guilty of a double dereliction of duty in abandoning their exercise.
Childbirth accelerated the advance of the tuberculosis from which she suffered, and she died on 22 February 1825, aged twenty-nine.