A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Franklin, Eleanor Ann
FRANKLIN, ELEANOR ANN,
Was the daughter of Mr. Porden, an eminent architect, and was born in 1795. She early manifested great talent and a strong memory, and acquired considerable knowledge of Greek and other languages. A knot of literary friends, who occasionally met at her father's house, fostered this natural bent of her genius: and their habit of furnishing contributions to a kind of album kept by the party, under the name of the "Salt Box, (selections from which have been printed,) did much towards confirming in her a passionate fondness for poetry. In her seventeenth year she wrote, as her share towards this domestic miscellany, her first poem, "The Veils, or the Triumphs of Constancy," which was published in 1816, with a dedication to Countess Spenser. Three years afterwards appeared a small "Poetical Tribute," under the name of "The Arctic Expedition," suggested by a visit to the Isabella and Alexander discovery ships, which visit led to an acquaintance with Captain Franklin, one of the gallant adventurers, that ended in marriage, after his return from the expedition, in the month of August, 1823. The year previously appeared Miss Porden's principal work, an epic poem on the subject of the third crusade, entitled "Cœur de Lion," dedicated by permission to the king. In June, 1824, the birth of a daughter encouraged hopes in her friends, that a strong tendency to a pulmonary complaint, increased by the bursting of a blood-vessel, in 1822, might be counteracted; but these flattering expectations were soon destroyed, and she died, February 22nd., 1825.