The Good Wife of Bath

Needs serious time commitment, but extremely worth it. Brooks gives a wonderful flavour of the period particularly how women worked and lived. It's obvious that she did a great deal of research and that this was a labour of love.
The character of The Wife of Bath is really fleshed out with all her flaws, as is Chaucer himself. Eleanor has a busy life veering from fortune to being down on her luck but mostly handling it with grace and fortitude, and sometimes escaping for pilgrimages. She is surrounded by a cast of vividly drawn characters including her husbands, the ever loyal Alyson, servants and people she picks up along the way and brings into her household, mostly due to them being down on their luck. I loved the depiction of her unusual family dynamics and the moral dilemmas that they sometimes cause her. If I had one criticism it would be that I wasn't a fan of Eleanor foreshadowing things so frequently, but that was a matter of personal taste which didn't particularly spoil an excellently written entertaining book.