PositiveThe TimesIn this fine biography, Marion Turner...gives us new images of the poet ... Turner’s biography takes us from birth to death in 1400, but focuses on the spaces through which Chaucer moved, in reality and in poetic imagination. This is a clever move because there are any number of guides to Chaucer’s writings, and Turner’s technique means that the poet’s works can be woven organically into an account of his life ... The book is elegantly written ... it would be accessible to the general reader as well as the scholarly specialist. Throughout his works Chaucer refuses again and again to weigh things up for us and come to a decisive conclusion; nor does Turner, imitating her subject, but in suggesting further questions and presenting an array of new images, her book gives us back a Chaucer more melancholy and mercurial than the cosy figure we thought we knew.
