New Books Network: Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography"

Podcast Date: November 27, 2025
Host: Rebecca Buchanan
Guest: Marion Turner
Book: The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023)

Episode Overview

This episode features a conversation with Marion Turner about her ground-breaking book, The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Turner, an esteemed Chaucer scholar, discusses her innovative approach—writing a biography of the Wife of Bath, one of literature’s most iconic fictional women. The episode explores how this "biography" is not only about Chaucer’s character but also a vibrant tapestry of real and imagined women’s lives across 650 years. Turner and Buchanan dig into the Wife’s origins, her historical context, her literary afterlives, and the ways she continues to inspire, provoke, and reclaim voice across the centuries.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Write a Biography of a Fictional Character?

• Turner’s Motivation: Turner explains her unconventional project—biographizing a fictional woman—as an opportunity to illuminate the "lost lives" of many real medieval women through the prism of an exceptional literary creation.

  "Writing a biography of this fictional medieval woman was really a way for me to write the lives of many, many women... I use the first half of the book really to weave the story of this literary character alongside many stories of real medieval women." – Marion Turner [03:00]

• The project spans from historical context (medieval England) up to contemporary interpretations, such as Zadie Smith’s play, showcasing 650 years of influence and adaptability.

2. The Wife of Bath’s Uniqueness in Chaucer and Literature

• Who is the Wife of Bath?:
  • Only secular (non-nun) woman among Chaucer’s tale-telling pilgrims.
  • Has the longest prologue, offering a depth of inner life and subjectivity absent from other characters.
• A Groundbreaker:
  • Before Chaucer, English literature rarely featured "ordinary" women.
  • The Wife of Bath is “ordinary” (middle-aged, working, multiple marriages, socially active) yet extraordinary in voice and presence.

  "Before Chaucer invented the Wife of Bath, there were not what I would call ordinary women in English literature... She’s ordinary in that she is of an ordinary social background. She’s sexually active, she’s working. She’s also, of course, absolutely extraordinary..." – Marion Turner [06:10]

3. Real Medieval Women: Work, Inheritance, and Agency

• Reassessing Medieval Women's Lives:
  • Contrary to modern assumptions, women in 14th-century England often worked and had more legal and economic rights than we imagine.
  • Women of all classes managed estates, ran businesses, apprenticed in trades, served as brewers, merchants—or even owned ships.

  "Women have always worked, and in the Middle Ages, you know, many women had jobs, and women of all different social [classes] worked...There are some women who clearly followed their talents or followed economic necessity into a whole range of quite unusual jobs." – Marion Turner [08:30]

  • The aftermath of the Black Death created more opportunities for women due to labor shortages.
  • English laws allowed women to inherit and maintain property, increasing their independence, including over marriage decisions.
• Cautions About Idealization:
  • Turner stresses not to romanticize this era—women’s lives were still fraught with peril, lack of rights, and danger, but agency and voice appeared in surprising ways.

4. Women as Storytellers and Travelers

• Narrative Power:
  • The Wife of Bath is remarkable for being a female storyteller, narrating both her own life and challenging dominant male narratives:

    "She says, if women had told their stories as men have in their oratories, they would have said many things about the wickedness of men. And then there’s this famous line where she says, 'Who painted the lion? Tell me who.'" – Marion Turner [14:47]

  • Literary references and struggles over authorial voice echo through time, from medieval fables to Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.
• Women as Wanderers:
  • The Wife’s excessive travel (multiple Jerusalem pilgrimages) reflects real trends—women did travel for business, pilgrimage, and opportunity.
  • Anecdote of Margery Kempe’s maid, who leverages service and travel for social ascent—a story of female self-determination [18:25].

Memorable Moment:

> "My favorite women from this book is Margery Kemp’s maid... she travels around Europe and the Holy Land with her, but in fact abandons her employer, heads off, gets a better job, then gets another better job and ends up...dispensing charity to her former employer." – Marion Turner [18:55]

5. The Wife of Bath’s Literary Afterlife

• Shakespeare and Beyond:
  • Shakespeare was heavily influenced by Chaucer, especially the Wife of Bath, who inspired key characters like Falstaff.
  • Turner draws parallels between Falstaff and the Wife: both overflowing with life, wit, and memorable voice, repeatedly resurrected by their authors.

  "Falstaff’s main kind of antecedent was the Wife of Bath. Both characters...they spill off into other texts. They both seem to die at one point but are then resurrected." – Marion Turner [22:40]

• Suppression and Satire:
  • Later male authors and adaptors often felt compelled to censor or mock her radical voice:

    "Alexander Pope...cut out all the bits where she’s talking about her body, her genitals, her enjoyment of sex... John Gay and Percy Mackaye...wrote plays that essentially humiliate her and focus on putting her in her place." – Marion Turner [26:35]

  • Across centuries, her most transgressive attributes—sexuality, wit, agency—provoked both fascination and backlash.

6. Global and Modern Adaptations

• Cross-Cultural Resonance:
  • The Wife of Bath is continually reinterpreted across cultures and media: from 18th-century France (Voltaire), theatrical adaptations in Brazil, to films like Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales (where she becomes a monstrous figure).

  "She hits Europe, throughout the 18th century...But also has impact in many other countries. Just a few years ago there was a play about her in Brazil..." – Marion Turner [31:10]

  • Poster imagery from 1970s Communist Poland—where she is depicted as a symbol of consumption—illustrates her persistent symbolic power.
• Misogyny in Adaptation:
  • Turner argues that some of the most hostile versions appear in the 20th century, warning that progress in representation is not guaranteed:

    "I would say that the most misogynist and disturbing versions of the Wife of Bath have probably been 20th-century ones...sometimes history seems to go backwards." – Marion Turner [34:13]

7. Contemporary Reclamation: Black and Female Voices

• New Authorship, New Resonance:
  • Recent adaptations and reinterpretations are led by women and Black writers—Patience Agbabi (Wife of Bafa), Jean Binta Breeze (Wife of Bath in Brixton Market), and Zadie Smith (The Wife of Willesden).

    "Many of the most recent writers about Alison...are women and many of them are Black women, interestingly. And we’re really seeing Alison’s...voice being reclaimed now." – Marion Turner [35:51]

  • These works foreground issues of sexual violence, marginalization, and intersectional identity, making the Wife newly relevant for contemporary struggles.
  • Zadie Smith situates the Wife’s narrative in Jamaican diasporic contexts, tying the medieval past to Britain’s postcolonial present.

    "If you’re British, whatever your own background is, thinking about the history of Jamaica is as relevant as thinking about the Arthurian past...Our culture is always embedded in this broader world." – Marion Turner [39:24]

8. The Enduring Power and Potential Future

• Why Does the Wife Endure?
  • Marion Turner emphasizes the way the Wife lives in readers' memories, continually inciting both creative and critical responses.

    "She wakes something up in people...So many people have said to me, she’s the character that I remember...she remains somewhere in their head." – Marion Turner [41:39]

  • She anticipates the character's future in new media, mentioning interactive AI and gaming experiences that could make the Wife of Bath accessible to new generations.

    "I think one thing that’s next for her is kind of computer game interactive versions...We have new opportunities and I think we need to...harness them." [42:25]

Memorable Quotes

• On Representation & Voice:

  "If the pen has always been in men’s hands, you know, this is something that Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and many women across time went on saying, because these problems didn’t [go away]." – Marion Turner [15:20]

• On Changing Attitudes:

  "The most misogynist and disturbing versions of the Wife of Bath have probably been 20th century ones. There are some bad ones earlier as well, but I think the 20th-century ones are probably the very worst." – Marion Turner [34:20]

• On Contemporary Engagement:

  "Contemporary postcolonial writers or writers from the African diaspora who are engaging...with Chaucer are putting a new lens on those texts and I think reminding us of all the different ways to approach them." – Marion Turner [40:42]

Timestamps to Key Segments

• Introduction & Motivation for the Book – [02:35]
• Wife of Bath’s Place in Canterbury Tales and Literary History – [04:56]
• Medieval Working Women & Inheritance – [08:20]
• Women Storytellers and Travelers – [14:07], [18:25]
• Shakespeare and the Wife of Bath – [22:01]
• Silencing/Adapting the Wife: Pope, Dryden, Gay, Mackaye – [26:06]
• International Adaptations & 20th Century Misogyny – [30:45], [34:13]
• Black Women Writers and Reclamation Today – [35:45]
• The Character’s Enduring Impact and Future – [41:19]
• Marion Turner’s Upcoming Projects – [44:12]

Conclusion

Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: A Biography brings the imagined and the historical together, providing a dynamic portrait of women’s agency and literary innovation from medieval to modern times. The podcast reveals the Wife of Bath’s power as a transformative figure—one who continues to challenge, entertain, and inspire across centuries, cultures, and media.