Turner shows with great care how literature and life come together in Chaucer’s writing ... She piles up fascinating evidence about women’s economic power in England after the Black Death, about the anxieties independent widows like Alison provoked in society, about women’s hopes for healing (and fear of assault) on pilgrimages... 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 ... Turner’s biography of Alison of Bath demonstrates the stunning resonance of medieval prejudice in the present. But Turner also shows the many ways that writers through the centuries have subverted the misogynist canon: none more revolutionary than Chaucer himself.
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' ... Turner’s greatest skill is her ability to present years of arcane research in chapters that are always wonderfully accessible and briskly entertaining ... Turner’s most audacious claim is that Chaucer created what we now think of as real people with interior minds in fiction.
... this book is an intriguing combination of the fantastically bawdy and the deadly serious. It contains all the academic throat-clearing you might expect from a dissertation... and all the forensic research, too ... Turner is clearly a Wife of Bath megafan... and readers are assumed to have a thorough knowledge of the original text.
Turner’s book is in two halves, first looking at the real possibilities for a woman like Alison—her given name—in the late 14th century, and then showing how she has been picked up and re-imagined through the centuries up to now. Ms. Turner’s first conclusion is that Alison is indeed very plausible ... Ms. Turner deepens her point with studies of women like Margaret Stodeye.
Turner exhaustively, painstakingly and sometimes clunkily (there’s a few 'hilariously's that aren’t all that hilarious) catalogues all these afterlives. To literary nerds and students with Chaucer essays to write it’s useful, but for everyone else (and this is a book intended for the lay reader) it’s of limited interest ... Somewhat ironically then, for a book inspired by a “timeless” character, the most interesting chapters are those in which Turner considers Alison in the context of her own time ... The Wife of Bath is a small literary miracle: an oddity and a trailblazer whose mischievous energy this erudite but ponderous book doesn’t quite manage to emulate.
Turner is a painstaking researcher, and for the latter half of the book I think she took too many pains ... We therefore learn more than we probably ever needed to know about the afterlife of The Canterbury Tales ... Still, when there is a literary character who can be shown without doubt to be carrying some of the Wife of Bath’s genes, you are grateful for Turner’s thoroughness. She is especially adept at drawing meaning not only from characters’ similarities but also from their differences.
The idea of writing a fictional character’s biography might strike some as baffling. As Turner asks in her introduction, 'What does it mean to write a ‘biography’ of someone who never existed?'. 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 ... thoroughly engaging.
Just as diversity strengthens any system, Turner’s transdisciplinary practice and Alison’s innate complexity bolster the Wife of Bath’s apparent immunity to any lasting censorship ... 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.
Informative, clear-sighted, entertaining and as opinionated as its subject, Turner’s new book is a wonderful introduction to the lives of 14th-century women, The Canterbury Tales and the fascinating ways in which Alison has been read and misread ... This is a wonderfully witty, thoughtful and authoritative meditation on one of English literature’s most astonishing characters.
[Turner] makes no pretense of examining all of those adaptations and interpretations in these pages; rather, she concentrates on an illustrative handful and explores them in depth. It’s fun, thought-provoking popular scholarship at its best ... [Turner's] interest in and affection for the Wife is so consistently apparent and inviting that it makes the book feel like equal parts travelogue and dialogue.
Turner’s prose is straightforward, artful, and occasionally biting ... Fans of Chaucer’s work and literature lovers more generally shouldn’t miss this.
