Marion Turner, The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023, xii, 324 pp., 14 color figures.

Professor Marion Turner’s sequel to her award-winning biography, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, 2019) revisits the fourteenth-century author’s life and times through an unexpected yet highly innovative lens: the life and times of one of his most significant creations, Alison, the Wife of Bath. Turner’s inquiry proceeds from a simple question: how and why has this character remained not only relevant in the western cultural imagination down the centuries, but influential? At first glance, her marginal status as “the first ordinary woman in English literature” would seem to contradict her high cultural value, were it not for the oceans of unique, extraordinary experiences that come with such ordinariness (p. 2). Readers soon learn that even in Chaucer’s very own Alison – a well-off, entrepreneurial yet working-class, sexually active woman – inheres myriad expressions of the female and human self that countless artists and scholars have mined through the present day.