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When I was in graduate school at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1975, I happened upon a book in the stacks of Alderman Library called The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, a product of the Victorian era by Mary Cowden Clark. I didn’t read the book. I didn’t even remove it from the shelf. But I’ve never forgotten the title, which struck me as an astonishingly silly topic to explore and to deserve a place in a section full of serious Shakespearean scholarship. Today we’d call it Fan Fiction and shrug it off as a harmless amusement. But nearly half a century ago and still today, I marvel at its location in the library.
So when I heard that Marion Turner had published The Wife of Bath: A Biography, I thought that a noted biographer of Chaucer had decided to dabble in some fan fiction of her own. Then I read the reviews, and then I read the book. Turner’s “biography” of a fictional character is actually an accessible and enlightening work of scholarship. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer tells us that the Wife of Bath is named Alison—the name that Turner uses throughout her book—and that she has had five husbands, has traveled extensively, and is adept at cloth-making. Turner begins her book by examining the frequency with which medieval women remarried—it was not at all unusual—and by discussing the ways that women could be property holders, operators of businesses, travelers, and possessors of independent wealth. We get to know the literary ancestors of Alison, especially in the character La Vielle in The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and in due time we meet her literary descendants. I thought that Turner was straining when she claimed that Shakespeare created Falstaff as a male version of the Wife of Bath, but I have to admit that in the play where Falstaff first appears, Henry IV, Part 1, there’s a direct reference to pilgrims traveling to Canterbury, a clear sign that Shakespeare knew the works of Chaucer. Turner makes a stronger case for Molly Bloom as a version of Alison in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and there’s no denying the continuing reimagining of Alison by today’s writers, perhaps most famously by Zadie Smith in The Wife of Willesden, a play drawing on and modernizing Chaucer. This biography is the antithesis of fan fiction. It opens a window onto the heritage and the legacy of one of the most significant characters in literary history.
The other most memorable book I read this month was Eleanor Catton’s Birnham Wood, the title of which ominously recalls one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest and most unsettling plays. Catton is a New Zealander. She sets the novel in her home country, and yet the villain—the Macbeth-like billionaire whose mastery of technology gives him an almost supernatural ability to manipulate cell phones and other devices—is an American. Taking her time to introduce us to a large cast of characters, Catton jumps from one point of view to another and initially is Jane-Austen-esque in so forthrightly telling us about what the characters are thinking and how they came to their current state. Then gradually and relentlessly Catton gives us more conversation and more action. She heightens the suspense when our exposure to these various points of view have tipped us to the disastrous misinterpretations and assumptions each character is making. By the end of the novel she has delivered an unabashed thriller with an ending that nobody could predict and yet everybody will believe. This is my first encounter with the works of Eleanor Catton, but it won’t be the last. She’s the youngest person ever to win the Booker Prize (for The Luminaries in 2013, when she was 28), and in Birnam Wood she has written what turns out to be one hell (pun intended) of a story.