The Wife of Bath: A Biography
By Marion Turner
Princeton University Press 2023

It’s a truism every reader has experienced: some fictional characters feel as real flesh-and-blood people. There aren’t many; despite the vast ocean of fictional creations, the roster of living, breathing people remains stubbornly small. And in the traditional canon, one of the foremost such characters outside of the works of Shakespeare is Alyson, Chaucer’s saucy, oft-married Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales. She finally gets the lively, full-length study she’s always deserved in Marion Turner’s new book The Wife of Bath: A Biography. 

Turner, whose 2019 Chaucer: A European Life is one of the best, most nuanced biographies the poet has ever received, here writes at half that book’s hefty length and could easily have written at four times the length, considering how many writers have translated the Wife’s tale into how many different worlds and artforms. She 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. 

“The Wife of Bath is the first ordinary woman in English literature,” Turner writes. “Indeed, before Chaucer, there had never been characters like this at all in English literature; characters from ordinary life who talk about themselves and their own experiences in detail, narrating personal histories and encouraging sympathetic response and identification.” The fact that Chaucer could create such a character – a woman who not only loves her independent life but also comments wryly on the dominance of men in her culture – is something Turner calls “astounding” (it’s a niggling little reflex throughout the book: Chaucer the accidental who’d’a-thunk-it genius). 

More than any other pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath captivates for herself far more than for her actual Tale, so it’s not surprising that later writers have been drawn to interpret, adapt, and alloy her for their own artistic ends. Turner spends some time with John Dryden, and with The Wanton Wife of Bath, which was written before 1600 and rewritten around 1700 – and whose licentiousness landed writers in jail. She follows the story through into far fields. “In the eighteenth century, Alison started to travel widely and to emerge in new incarnations in various languages and countries,” she writes. “She was taken up by an extraordinary variety of thinkers – ranging from the eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire to the twentieth-century Italian Marxist filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. Alison reached her adaptors in different forms: while Voltaire read Dryden’s version, Pasolini read an Italian translation.” 

And through it all, the thread binding all these different interpretations, is Turner herself, whose 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. The result is a fascinating coda to Chaucer: A European Life – and, along the way, it naturally whets the appetite for a fully-annotated Canterbury Tales from this author.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.