Poetry
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The Wife of Bath: A Biography
From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo
Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers―from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.
A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women―from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison's post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers.
Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.
Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers―from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.
A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women―from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison's post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers.
Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.
Editorial Reviews
"Marion Turner is a wonderful Chaucer scholar, able to convey the fascination of his works and world over the great distance of six hundred years."―Zadie Smith
"A brilliant, learned, imaginative, and spellbinding improvisation on biographical narrative about ‘someone who never existed,' but who changed the way we think about women in late-medieval England―and now."―Hermione Lee, author of Tom Stoppard: A Life
"Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath is one of the most famous and compelling characters in the whole of English literature. Marion Turner's new study is the ‘biography' she deserves. Deft, smart, and brilliantly readable, it explores the post-Black Death world that created Alison of Bath, and considers what she has come to represent in the six-and-a-half centuries since. This is a fine, elegant, and impassioned tribute to everyone's favourite Canterbury pilgrim."―Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets and Powers & Thrones
"Great books break the rules in order to rewrite them. Marion Turner's splendid The Wife of Bath breaks the rules of biography by writing about a fictional character. The book's two halves, one about the ‘historical' Wife of Bath, the other about her reception up to and into the current century, are equally vibrant and packed with novelties. The rules have been joyfully rewritten."―James Simpson, Harvard University
"A brilliant, learned, imaginative, and spellbinding improvisation on biographical narrative about ‘someone who never existed,' but who changed the way we think about women in late-medieval England―and now."―Hermione Lee, author of Tom Stoppard: A Life
"Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath is one of the most famous and compelling characters in the whole of English literature. Marion Turner's new study is the ‘biography' she deserves. Deft, smart, and brilliantly readable, it explores the post-Black Death world that created Alison of Bath, and considers what she has come to represent in the six-and-a-half centuries since. This is a fine, elegant, and impassioned tribute to everyone's favourite Canterbury pilgrim."―Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets and Powers & Thrones
"Great books break the rules in order to rewrite them. Marion Turner's splendid The Wife of Bath breaks the rules of biography by writing about a fictional character. The book's two halves, one about the ‘historical' Wife of Bath, the other about her reception up to and into the current century, are equally vibrant and packed with novelties. The rules have been joyfully rewritten."―James Simpson, Harvard University
Readers Top Reviews
joan c mazzella
Could not read this book. Cover reeked of toxic ink, which contaminated the book. Had an allergic reaction. Surprised the publisher decided to use this cheap method of mass printlting. Returning for a refund.
