She is perhaps Chaucer's most attracted character. She is an obsessive seamstress. She is somewhat deaf. She is forever first at the offering at the mass, and if an important goes ahead of her, she feels depressed. She wears head coverings to the mass which the narrator thinks weighs 10 pounds. She has taken three pilgrimages to Jerusalem and has had five husbands. She has also been to Rome, Cologne and other pilgrimage sites. Her teeth have gaps between them. She is cheerful and talkative, and she gives good love recommendation since she has had a lot of knowledge.
She is vain, bossy and immoral, a character typically portrayed by woman hating writers. But Chaucer's portrayal is so sensible and caring that it is hard to believe that he wanted to show her as a satire of a dreadful woman. She has married 5 times and maintains that Christ has never preached that people should be satisfied with one marriage. She affirms that Jesus had stressed that one should go ahead and enjoy bodily pleasures. Her first three husbands were quiet polite while the last two were awful. The first three were wealthy old and impotent. They handed over all their possessions to her in return for physical favours. She used her body at will to extract what she wished from these men. She deliberately used to start quarreling with these men by hurling a handful of grievances and abject lies of their alleged affairs so that she could cover up her follies with young men. She used these means to control her husbands.
The fourth husband was an ideal match for her. He was a lecherous man who maintained mistresses throughout his life. He died young and she moved on to the fifth husband. This man was cruel and beat her at every pretext. She was hugely fond of him because he played hard to get.
The fifth husbands name was jankin. She had an affair with him while she was still married to her