THE WIFE OF BATH: A BIOGRAPHY
by Marion Turner

A review by Julia Spry-Leverton

Why would anyone want to hear a lengthy, mouthy monologue trumpeted by an aging widow woman determined to ‘share’ with you every last detail of her florid love life and holiday travel itinerary? Well, according to this new biography by Marion Turner, if it’s Alison, the Wife of Bath who’s telling the story, there are myriad reasons you should listen, and listen good.

Of the twenty-four characters, all of them pilgrims riding horseback to visit St Thomas à Becket’s shrine, described in The Canterbury Tales by poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1387-1400) Alison is the most prominent, her story the longest and most highly-coloured. Turner, Oxford J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature and Chaucer expert, goes so far as to describe Alison as Chaucer’s ‘most fully-developed character.’

Turner is patently an immense Alison fan and through her eyes we discover just how entertaining a pilgrimage companion the late fourteenth century, five-times-married cloth merchant would have been: ebullient, fearlessly outspoken – as well as witty, laughing willingly at herself, requesting her listeners,  

“Do not be annoyed by what I say

For my intention is only to amuse’*

Amusing, surely – but influential too, beyond her lifetime, Turner saying of Alison, ‘I can think of no other .. woman who has anything like [her] reach, influence and capacity for reincarnation.’ Reflecting such importance, Turner gives us not just Alison’s biodata but an exploration of the entire social world she operated in, while also situating her in her literary context.

It is a big canvas – but in order to answer the ‘why’ of her central question about Alison, one that’s needed by Turner as the background against which she’s to be examined. Why it is, that is, that in Turner’s view, ‘Chaucer’s readers immediately and consistently respond[ed] to her with more passion, emotion, love, horror, outrage, and adoration than they did to any other of Chaucer’s characters – or perhaps to any other literary character at all.’ 

This is a remarkable claim considering that, over literary history’s long centuries, until recently the case has frequently been one of men taking the hero roles, women relegated as adjuncts, mere accessories. Justifying it, Turner is acutely sensitive to the foregrounding of feminism – and its implications – in her rendering of Alison’s life and legacy. What’s impressive in her research is that due to its all-encompassing nature, she’s able to address and effortlessly bat away so many of the misogynistic criticisms the Wife of Bath’s tale has accrued in its six hundred-years life.

In appreciating Turner’s enthusiasm for the Wife of Bath’s significance it’s a help that the modern reader can identify with the extent Alison’s evolved as her own person: independent (emotionally and financially), forthright, clear-eyed in regard to her lived experience, and, as an older woman lacking self-pity, stating ‘….it does myn herte boote (it’s rewarding to my heart) that I have had my world, as in my tyme.’

In Alison’s tyme pilgrimage is her pastime. Such journeys were generally considered a rewarding way to sight-see both at home and in foreign lands, with the added advantage of the religious ‘credit’ to be derived from devout behaviour undergone in some hardship. Alison is a veteran, five pilgrimages already behind her, including Rome, Santiago and three to Jerusalem, her appetite as yet unjaded for the adventures, amatory and otherwise, such travel promises.

Turner’s biography takes the reader on neither a line-by-line study of the journey’s progress nor into every twist and turn in Alison’s tale, so a grounding in Chaucer’s storyline** is recommended in order to get the maximum benefit from the voice of the woman who, according to Turner, Chaucer pioneered as the ‘first ordinary middleclass woman in English literature.’  

The biography picks up pace as it approaches the modern era, with names such as Beyonce and Zadie Smith scattered across its concluding pages. In these, having decried the majority of male adaptations of the Wife of Bath’s story as misogynistic failures, Turner recounts enthusiastically how women artists today are innovative in celebrating Alison’s wit, wisdom and relevance across diverse media. In a final tribute Alison is epitomized by Turner as a woman who, having ‘intimidated and frightened so many male writers and artists across time .. ultimately would not be suppressed.’

The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner is published by Princeton University Press (2023).

*This quotation is in modern English translation, see ** below for details

**Such as via the modern English language version of The Wife of Bath’s Tale: A Contemporary Translation and the Annotated Original by Carmen Geraci (independently published 2021), an accessible route for those of us who have not studied Middle English.