Home › Books › The Wife of Bath: A Biography
The Wife of Bath: A Biography
by
42/99
Critics' Rating Index
32/99
Readers' Rating Index
89/99
Scholars' Citation Index
84/99
Volume of Reviews
42/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
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.
Reviews
"Turner exhaustively, painstakingly and sometimes clunkily (there's a few 'hilariously's that aren't all that hilarious) catalogues all these afterlives."
"Fans of Chaucer's work and literature lovers more generally shouldn't miss this."
"Turner's immensely entertaining 'biography' will make you fall in love with the Wife of Bath, whom she crowns 'the first ordinary woman in English literature' ..."
"The history of women in the Middle Ages is fraught with uncertainties, especially when it comes to source material and authorship; Turner unfurls this complexity in elegant, quietly angry prose, grounded in deep scholarly research ..."
"It contains all the academic throat-clearing you might expect from a dissertation..."
"But what she demonstrates throughout her wide- ranging book is that Alison is a composite of women who did exist in medieval mercantile towns, in marriages, on pilgrimages and in books ..."
"Turner is a painstaking researcher, and for the latter half of the book I think she took too many pains ..."
"Turner deepens her point with studies of women like Margaret Stodeye."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!