Brief Lives: Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet, bureaucrat, and diplomat, and his richly imaginative and witty works, written in vernacular English rather than courtly French or Latin, established his mother tongue as a literary language in its own right.

Although his writing is well-known, the biographical details of Chaucer’s life in fourteenth-century England remain scarce.

In this new biography, Gail Ashton examines the competing versions of ‘Chaucer’ that have sprung up in the centuries since his death and speculates about the extent to which his poetic legacy has been made to fit a range of agendas, especially those surrounding England and Englishness. Her biography is a deft and tantalizing study of one of the fathers of English literature.