The Wife Of Bath Marion Turner by Marion Turner 9780691206011, 0691206015 instant download after payment.

From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary & recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers—from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, & film.

In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer’s favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, & where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff & Molly Bloom to #MeToo & Black Lives Matter.

A sexually active & funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape & redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison’s fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women—from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, & forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison’s post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads & Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers.

Entertaining & enlightening, funny & provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary & feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.