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.
Title: The Wife of Bath: A Biography
Author: Turner, Marion
ISBN: 9780691206011
Binding:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: 2023-01-17
Number of Pages: 336
Weight: 0.5992 kg
Those who foreground alternative voices must reach for innovative forms and reworkings of genre. Turner does this brilliantly, allowing Alison of Bath to speak for the legions of contemporary women otherwise silenced by history. ---Daisy Hay, Financial Times
[A] superb biography....Turner's beautifully written, rewarding and thought-provoking book about this imaginary woman shows how much her literary existence has to say about actual women's lives. ---Gillian Kenny, The Spectator
This is a wonderfully witty, thoughtful and authoritative meditation on one of English literature's most astonishing characters - a woman both ahead of her time and yet very much emblematic of the social changes under way in 14th-century England.
---Carolyne Larrington, Literary Review A wonderful biography.
---Mary Wellesley, Telegraph [A] passionate literary 'biography'. . . . Turner's prose is straightforward, artful, and occasionally biting. . . . Fans of Chaucer's work and literature lovers more generally shouldn't miss this. * Publishers Weekly *
This engrossing academic study helps you appreciate why, nearly eight centuries after Chaucer brought her to life, this funny, sexually confident middle-aged woman remains a titan of literature.
---Martin Chilton, The Independent [A] lively biography.
---Eleanor Parker, History Today Turner's scholarly yet lively portrait of her [The Wife of Bath] reveals much about the real-life women who were the earliest readers of her tale, and about the cultures that have been captivated by her ever since.
---Pippa Bailey, New Statesman Written in elegant, accessible prose,
The Wife of Bath reinvents literary criticism to tell the extraordinary story of one of English literature's most memorable, norm-busting characters. * Foreword Reviews *
Erudite.
---Susie Goldsbrough, The Times A brilliant commentary on Chaucer's 'Alisoun' and the posthumous relevance of Alison in our fractious world of gender politics.
---Timothy Mowl, Country Life [A] superb exploration of the most memorable character in
The Canterbury Tales. ---Matthew D'Ancona, Tortoise An intriguing combination of the fantastically bawdy and the deadly serious [...] thrilling.
---Katy Guest, The Guardian As Marion Turner's thoroughly engaging book makes clear, Alison has thrived nonetheless; she remains a woman 'who intimidated and frightened so many male writers and artists across time, but who ... would not be suppressed'
---Mary C. Flannery, Times Literary Supplement [A] fascinating exploration of the Wife and her afterlives.
---Lucasta Miller, The Critic