Many lives of the first everywoman

Lucasta Miller

‘‘EXPERIENCE, THOUGH noon auctoritee/Were in this world, is right ynogh for me,” goes the opening of the Wife of Bath’s first-person prologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387) — a statement brilliantly translated for our own age in 2000 by the poet Jean Binta Breeze as “My life is my own bible” in her poem “The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market” which reworks Chaucer’s original in modern Jamaican English. Such spin-offs from the archetypal character — who also lies behind James Joyce’s Molly Bloom — intrigue Marion Turner in this fascinating exploration of the Wife and her afterlives. You don’t have to have read Chaucer in the original Middle English, or even a modern literary spin-off, to have heard of Wife of Bath. She’s a brand name all will…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2023

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