The Good Wife of Bath by Karen Brooks
About Karen Brooks
Karen Brooks is the author of fourteen books – historical fiction, historical fantasy, YA fantasy, and one non-fiction. She was an academic for over 20 years, a newspaper columnist and social commentator. She has a Ph.D. in English/Cultural Studies and has published internationally on all things popular culture, education and social psychology. An award-winning teacher, she’s taught throughout Australia and in The Netherlands and keynoted at many education conferences. Nowadays, she finds greatest contentment studying history and writing, and helping her husband in his Brewstillery, Captain Bligh’s. She shares a beautiful stone house in Hobart, Tasmania, built in 1868, with her husband, adorable dogs and cats, and shelves brimming with books. For further information:
A Quote from Karen Brooks
“It is both humbling and such an honour to be longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize. Historical fiction puts creative flesh on history’s dry bones by reimagining people and events of the past. It builds temporal bridges for us to cross and thus discover our common humanity. The struggles, desires, hopes, despair, fears, and dreams we share, regardless of time and social or cultural contexts. It was such a joy to bring to life and celebrate the strengths and weaknesses of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. In giving a previously mocked and derided female character a voice and having her tell her own story, it was astonishing to discover that though she’s 800 years old, her tale IS ours as well. This is why awards like this are so important. They acknowledge what historical fiction does best – it revisions history, sheds light in dark corners, and can offer alternate, entertaining, and meaningful versions of a past that, for too long, has been beholden to voices of power and privilege. Thank you so much for this.”
About The Good Wife of Bath
England, 1364. When married off aged 12 to an elderly farmer, Eleanor Cornfed, quickly realises it won’t matter what she says or does, God is not on her side. But Eleanor was born under the joint signs of Venus and Mars. Both a lover and a fighter, she will not bow meekly to fate. Even if five marriages, several pilgrimages, many lovers, violence, mayhem and wildly divergent fortunes do not for a peaceful life make. Alyson, the counsel of one Geoffrey Chaucer, and a good head for business, Eleanor fights to protect those she loves from the vagaries of life, the character deficits of her many husbands, the brutalities of medieval England and her own fatal flaw… a lusty appreciation of mankind. All while continuing to pursue the one thing all women want – control of their own lives. This funny, clever retelling of Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ from The Canterbury Tales is a cutting assessment of what happens when male power is left to run unchecked, as well as a recasting of a literary classic that gives a maligned character her own voice, and allows her to tell her own (mostly) true story.
