Ken McGoogan

Questions and Answers
(with publisher Phyllis Bruce):

1. How did you become interested in Jane Lady Franklin?

In autumn 1998, while working on my book Fatal Passage in Cambridge, England, I began wondering why Arctic explorer John Rae had failed to receive the recognition he deserved.
After all, Rae had discovered both the final link in the Northwest Passage and the fate of the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin. As I sifted through letters and documents at the Scott Polar Research Institute and consulted old newspapers at the Cambridge University Library, I discovered that Charles Dickens had crucially undermined Rae’s reputation by writing and publishing two articles in Household Words – and that he had done so at the behest of Jane Franklin.

The erasure from history of John Rae, the injustice of it, disturbed me enough that in Fatal Passage, I portrayed Jane Franklin as essentially villainous. My outrage did not quickly dissipate, and it must have surfaced when I spoke of the book, because again and again, after giving a public reading, I found myself answering questions about Jane Franklin. Who was this powerful woman? And how, precisely, did she bring about such a change in the historical record?

Even so, I didn’t seriously consider writing a book about Jane until the autumn of 2002, when I was living in Dawson City, Yukon. As writer-in-residence at Berton House, I gave a reading from Fatal Passage. Afterwards, as I signed a few books, a visiting playwright told me: “You feel so strongly about Jane Franklin that you really should write a book about her.” I muttered noncommittally, but she insisted: “No, no, really: think about it.” When I arrived home that night, I sat down to scribble a few notes . . . and discovered that I’d opened a floodgate.

2. What are the challenges, for a male writer, of embarking on a biography of such a formidable woman of an earlier century? What methods and materials did you use to get inside the head of Jane Franklin? (continued)

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