Elise Barack will lead a discussion of the novel Wanting by Richard Flanagan Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 7:15 pm in the downstairs programming room.Plot Summary:
Wanting , a story about civility and savagery, revolves around the 19th-century Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and his family. When Franklin becomes the governor of the penal colony on Tasmania his wife, barren and desperate for a child, adopts an orphaned aboriginal girl named Mathinna. Lady Franklin, burdened with the legacy of Enlightenment ideas and the biases of British Imperialism, sets out to raise her new daughter as a proper Englishwoman, even as she yearns for a child to love.
Civility and savagery are juxtaposed again many years later when Lady Franklin seeks to defend her late husband's honor from accusations of cannibalism after Sir John and his crew starve to death during an Arctic expedition. She contacts Charles Dickens, another famous Victorian, to write a play that will absolve the explorers. The result, “The Frozen Deep,” not only addresses the widow’s concerns but forces Dickens to face his own suffering after the death of a beloved daughter.
Author’s Biography:Richard Flanagan was born in 1961 in the mining town of Rosebery, Tasmania. After finishing school he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he earned a Master of Letters degree. He has written several histories and four other novels including The Unknown Terrorist and
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