The Wife of Bath: A Biography
Princeton U. Press 336pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99
Of all the vividly realised characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it is the Wife of Bath who has “most riotously escaped the Middle Ages”, said Erin Maglaque in The New York Times. Married and widowed five times, she is an astonishing creation – a wealthy businesswoman with many friends, who stands up against sexism, reflects on ageing, tells “wickedly funny” stories, and “unapologetically loves sex”. And, as Marion
Turner argues in this fascinating book, Alison of Bath is also the first “real woman” in English literature, a world away from the two-dimensional princesses, witches and damsels in distress who came before her. A professor of English at Oxford, Turner aims in this “biography” not only to celebrate her fictional life, but also to examine how Chaucer’s portrait reflects the reality of women’s lives in his time, and to describe how she has found an “afterlife” in the work of writers, feminists and “rebels” ever since.
Chaucer has Alison introduce herself in a lengthy prologue, said Carolyne Larrington in Literary Review. It tells how she inherited handsomely from her first four husbands; and that her fifth husband, whom she had made rich, bullied her “through endless reading of his infamous ‘book of wicked wives’, a misogynist catalogue of women’s misbehaviour”. Her social situation has struck later generations as surprising but, drawing on real-life examples, Turner shows that this wealthy clothmaker was typical of a new breed of working women who flourished amid labour shortages created by the Black Death in the late 14th century. Serial marriage was also common, keeping women and their money “in circulation”. The tale Alison goes on to tell the pilgrims – the story of a rapist knight “who is taught the error of his ways” – is a riposte to the misogyny of medieval literary culture.
Alison’s “bawdy charms” have sometimes made her a target of censorship, said Katherine Harvey in The Sunday Times. One 17th century ballad in which she appears was deemed so offensive that its authors were imprisoned. But she has also inspired iconic characters from Shakespeare’s Falstaff to Joyce’s Molly Bloom, and recent works – including Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden – have given her a new lease of life. Turner’s book is “learned and deeply researched”, said Mary Wellesley in The Daily Telegraph. It assumes a degree of familiarity with medieval literature, but is very readable even so, “with a joy, vitality and humour reminiscent of the Wife herself”.