The diaries of Jane Griffin have not previously been examined for their value to educational history. Held in the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute, they have attracted attention from few historians except those interested in her later life as Jane, Lady Franklin. The disappearance of her husband, Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, on a quest for the North West Passage precipitated Lady Franklin into fame in the 1850s as she lobbied ceaselessly for searches to establish his whereabouts and restore his reputation. Her archive has been plundered many times for the light it throws on this period of Arctic exploration. But the numerous volumes of diaries and other material that record her young adult life merit serious attention in their own right. They illuminate particularly the intellectual climate and cultural discourses of the early nineteenth century, and the impact these held for middle-class sensibility. This article focuses on her adventures in learning, at a time when Enlightenment thought and Romantic sensibility alike had encouraged a new focus on female education. Juxtaposing her own writing, her expressed views and experience, against the prescriptive literature on education, fictional and didactic, which she refers to explicitly in her personal papers, this article offers a contextualized account of her educational trajectory in early adulthood.