The Wife of Bath

"""A Financial Times Best Summer Book"" ""A New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year"" ""Those who foreground alternative voices must reach for innovative forms and reworkings of genre. Turner does this brilliantly, allowing Alison of Bath to speak for the legions of contemporary women otherwise silenced by history.""---Daisy Hay, Financial Times ""[A] superb biography….Turner's beautifully written, rewarding and thought-provoking book about this imaginary woman shows how much her literary existence has to say about actual women’s lives.""---Gillian Kenny, The Spectator ""This is a wonderfully witty, thoughtful and authoritative meditation on 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 14th-century England. ""---Carolyne Larrington, Literary Review ""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.""---Erin Maglaque, New York Times Book Review ""A wonderful biography.""---Mary Wellesley, Telegraph ""Marion Turner writes from a feminist perspective, but she is not a presentist—the kind of person who faults the past for failing to live up to the standards, or some people’s standards, of the present. . . . You are grateful for Turner’s thoroughness. She is especially adept at drawing meaning not only from characters’ similarities but also from their differences.""---Joan Acocella, New Yorker ""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.’ . . . Wonderfully accessible and briskly entertaining.""---Ron Charles, Washington Post ""[A] passionate literary ‘biography’. . . . Turner’s prose is straightforward, artful, and occasionally biting. . . . Fans of Chaucer’s work and literature lovers more generally shouldn’t miss this."" * Publishers Weekly * ""This engrossing academic study helps you appreciate why, nearly eight centuries after Chaucer brought her to life, this funny, sexually confident middle-aged woman remains a titan of literature.""---Martin Chilton, The Independent ""[A] lively biography.""---Eleanor Parker, History Today ""Turner’s scholarly yet lively portrait of her [The Wife of Bath] reveals much about the real-life women who were the earliest readers of her tale, and about the cultures that have been captivated by her ever since.""---Pippa Bailey, New Statesman ""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 * ""Erudite.""---Susie Goldsbrough, The Times ""A brilliant commentary on Chaucer’s ‘Alisoun’ and the posthumous relevance of Alison in our fractious world of gender politics.""---Timothy Mowl, Country Life ""[A] superb exploration of the most memorable character in The Canterbury Tales.""---Matthew D’Ancona, Tortoise ""An intriguing combination of the fantastically bawdy and the deadly serious [...] thrilling.""---Katy Guest, The Guardian ""As Marion Turner’s thoroughly engaging book makes clear, Alison has thrived nonetheless; she remains a woman ‘who intimidated and frightened so many male writers and artists across time, but who … would not be suppressed'""---Mary C. Flannery, Times Literary Supplement ""Turner’s enthralling take on Chaucer is so rich, inspiring and relevant.""---Lucasta Miller, The Critic ""[The Wife of Bath] finally gets the lively, full-length study she’s always deserved in Marion Turner’s new book The Wife of Bath: A Biography. . . . It’s fun, thought-provoking popular scholarship at its best.""---Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review ""[A] fascinating book."" * The Week * ""[Marion Turner] writes in a companionable way that makes this a most engaging book about a fourteenth-century woman.""---Sean Sheehan, The Prisma"