Re-creating Chaucer

Ruth Kennedy

pp. 54-67

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

My one simple biographical thesis in this paper is that, whatever the data, we re-create our subject in the light of our contemporary and our personal image. This is a given of biography, and can be illustrated by showing how, for six hundred years, my subject, Chaucer the man, has been re-created in images that are largely independent of the facts.