SOURCE: “The Masculine Narrator and Four Women of Style,” in Speaking of Chaucer, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1970, pp. 46-64.

In the following essay, Donaldson examines the way in which Chaucer “simultaneously” describes events from a number of different viewpoints while apparently seeing them from a singular point of view. In particular, Donaldson focuses on four of the women who become the object of the narrator's discussion: Emily (“The Knight's Tale”), May (“The Merchant's Tale”), Criseyde (Troilus and Criseyde), and the Prioress (“The Prioress's Tale”).

Not long ago an American Chaucerian harshly reprimanded those modern critics who talk about Chaucer as if he had a complicated or difficult style such as Donne's or Pope's. Chaucer, Professor Bronson asserts, was ‘a poet who deliberately practised a style capable of being instantly followed by a moderately attentive ear, and who seems to have had a genuine liking for russet yeas...