Turner shows with great care how literature and life come together in Chaucer’s writing.

Turner’s immensely entertaining 'biography' will make you fall in love with the Wife of Bath, whom she crowns 'the first ordinary woman in English literature'.

... this book is an intriguing combination of the fantastically bawdy and the deadly serious. It contains all the academic throat-clearing you might expect from a dissertation... and all the forensic research, too.

Turner’s book is in two halves, first looking at the real possibilities for a woman like Alison—her given name—in the late 14th century, and then showing how she has been picked up and re-imagined through the centuries up to now. Ms. Turner’s first conclusion is that Alison is indeed very plausible.

Turner exhaustively, painstakingly and sometimes clunkily (there’s a few 'hilariously's that aren’t all that hilarious) catalogues all these afterlives. To literary nerds and students with Chaucer essays to write it’s useful, but for everyone else (and this is a book intended for the lay reader) it’s of limited interest.

Turner is a painstaking researcher, and for the latter half of the book I think she took too many pains.

The idea of writing a fictional character’s biography might strike some as baffling. As Turner asks in her introduction, 'What does it mean to write a ‘biography’ of someone who never existed?'. But what she demonstrates throughout her wide- ranging book is that Alison is a composite of women who did exist in medieval mercantile towns, in marriages, on pilgrimages and in books.

Just as diversity strengthens any system, Turner’s transdisciplinary practice and Alison’s innate complexity bolster the Wife of Bath’s apparent immunity to any lasting censorship.

Informative, clear-sighted, entertaining and as opinionated as its subject, Turner’s new book is a wonderful introduction to the lives of 14th-century women, The Canterbury Tales and the fascinating ways in which Alison has been read and misread.

[Turner] makes no pretense of examining all of those adaptations and interpretations in these pages; rather, she concentrates on an illustrative handful and explores them in depth. It’s fun, thought-provoking popular scholarship at its best.

Turner’s prose is straightforward, artful, and occasionally biting.