The Wife of Bath
A Biography
-
- £14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this passionate literary "biography," Turner (Chaucer: A European Life) delves into the legacy of Chaucer's Alison of Bath. As Turner writes, "the story of Alison in the world... crosses continents as well as centuries, languages as well as gender, popular as well as high culture. Her story is still very much alive." Broken into two parts dealing with Alison's medieval and modern presence, Turner's study investigates the historical context, fictional characters, and working women that inspired Alison's creation: a large part of her "project," Turner posits, is to "shine a light on the fact that there is usually no place in stories like this for reasonable older women." The character influenced Shakespeare (in Merry Wives) as well as Zadie Smith (who wrote a play about her), Turner writes, and one of Alison's most notable aspects is her nonconformist nature: "whether readers and writers are more worried about her as a sexual, political, or religious rebel, those who wish to silence her are all motivated by seeing Alison as a threat to established authority and order." Turner's prose is straightforward, artful, and occasionally biting—"Across time, the point at which girls become sexually available is generally the point at which they become interesting to writers." Fans of Chaucer's work and literature lovers more generally shouldn't miss this.
