The Wife of Bath: A Biography

by Marion Turner

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691206035
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Pages:	344
Sales rank:	120,183
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Marion Turner is the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford, where she is a Professorial Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. Her books include the prize-winning biography Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction 1

Part I Medieval Wives of Bath: Ordinary Women and English Literature

Prologue. 'Beaten for a Book': Literary Form and Lived Experience 13

Chapter 1 The Invention of Character 20

Chapter 2 Working Women 48

Chapter 3 The Marriage Market 69

Chapter 4 The Female Storyteller 87

Chapter 5 The Wandering Woman 113

Part II Alison's Afterlife, 1400-2021

Prologue. 'Now Merrier and Extra Mature' 139

Chapter 6 Silencing Alison 143

Chapter 7 When Shakespeare Met Alison 166

Chapter 8 Alison Abroad 190

Chapter 9 Alison and the Novel 211

Chapter 10 Black Alisons: Wives of Brixton, Bafa, and Willesden 227

Acknowledgements 247

Notes 251

Bibliography 285

Index 309

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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

Editorial Reviews

"Masterful. . . . An invaluable study not only for those who research and teach Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales but also for those who are engaged with women and gender studies from the Middle Ages to the present day."

Choice Reviews

"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

09/26/2022

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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] fascinating book."

The Week

A Financial Times Best Summer Book

A New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year

"Shortlisted for the History Book of the Year Prize, History Reclaimed"

"Winner of the History Reclaimed Book of the Year Prize"

"A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year"

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

From the Publisher

Turner’s scholarly yet lively portrait of her [he wife of Bath] reveals much about the real-life women who were the earliest readers of her tale.”

New Statesman

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 fourteenth-century England.”

Literary Review

An intriguing combination of the fantastically bawdy and the deadly serious.”

The Guardian (London)