Ancient and Modern
(or ‘Twice-Told Tales’)
Chairperson Huw Griffith and Committee member Jean Hilder will discuss Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath and the recent novel by Australian author Karen Brooks, The Good Wife of Bath, showing how a story can be retold very differently from its original,
Chaucer’s tale needs no introduction. Brooks’s work is billed as a “funny, picaresque, clever retelling” of that tale, offering “a cutting assessment of what happens when male power is left to run unchecked”. Brooks gives “a maligned character her own voice, and allows her to tell her own (mostly) true story". The New York Journal of Books calls it a “satisfying, page-turning novel” whose protagonist “rewrites history into herstory’’.
Members are welcome to provide other examples of twice-told tales.