Liberated by Chaucer

Her husband was gone, her kids were out of the house and she had no job to speak of.

In the late 1970s, a recently divorced Anne Worthington Prescott ’52 found herself in need of solace.

“So if all doors are closed to you, it’s a great time for invention, for something new—so I started reading Chaucer,” she says. “If I had been distracted, I wouldn’t have gotten into Chaucer.”

Prescott found laughter in the fourteenth-century English poet’s texts—they cheered her up when she says she should have been depressed. Soon Geoffrey Chaucer permeated her life.

“I started hearing music,” she says. “I began starting to translate him to modern music performances. I’m still doing that.”

Her collaboration with composers has resulted in performances of her Chaucer settings in Germany and South Africa.

And next fall Prescott will publish her first book, Imagining Fame: An Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, an analysis of one of his lesser-known satires. Chaucer wrote the work as he was becoming famous, and Prescott says the work has much to say about contemporary culture’s obsession with celebrity.

Her passion for Chaucer also inspired a conversion to Catholicism.

“Chaucer was a very free-thinking Catholic,” says Prescott, who now attends mass regularly. “[My conversion] is part of my attraction to Chaucer. He was very devout.”

Spiritually, creatively and academically, a fourteenth-century icon has enabled a once shy girl from an impoverished southern aristocracy to become, as she says, “truly liberated.”

For Prescott, the changes in her life over the past two decades have recalled her years growing up in Virginia.

She was born the fifth Anne Lee of her family, a line of academic distinction—her grandfather had been Harvard’s registrar.

Katherine A. Brittell, a childhood neighbor, says Prescott exhibited her passion for literature at a young age.

“Anne was a year younger than I was and yet I felt she always was smarter than I was,” Brittell says. “She was reading War and Peace when I was reading the Wizard of Oz.”

Brittell and Prescott constructed a telephone hook-up by hanging a string between their facing windows, and her brother worked with Prescott on neighborhood play productions.

“They did a lot of that,” Brittell says. “The mothers would contribute little cakes and pies to sell during intermissions.”

Prescott looks back fondly on these carefree years—“then of course, I had to get serious about life,” she says.

Seriousness stifled the exuberance and creativity of childhood. Like many women of her generation, Prescott says her life was already laid out before her: she anticipated that she would become either a teacher or a secretary.

“I majored in English because I was sure I was going to be a teacher,” she says.

Like many of her Radcliffe classmates, she married before senior year and moved off campus. Married life didn’t leave time for her to pursue her true love of creative writing.

“When I married and had children I realized that if I tried to write and take care of children I would go crazy—or they would,” she says.

Though she flirted with the notion of studying medieval literature after graduation, she quickly dismissed the idea as an impossibility. At Radcliffe she had taken a class on Chaucer and found she liked the poet’s work, but left it behind to pursue the more practical classes in modern literature that she would need to become an English teacher.

She did eventually become a teacher, having taken graduate courses in education and English at Boston University after the youngest of her three daughters was five or six.

Married life also took her to New York City, where her husband was studying to be a doctor and where she began to reassert her the leadership she had once employed to plan the neighborhood plays.

By her own account, Prescott had shirked top positions as a Radcliffe undergraduate. But in New York, Prescott championed the establishment of the Medical Center Nursery School at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. She organized a group of the hospital’s mothers, battled the opposition of the city’s buildings department—and the hospital itself—and even telegraphed the mayor.

In the later years of her married life, Prescott assumed a number of teaching posts and helped to found a primary school in Brookline—but still hadn’t found a creative outlet.

Those who have been close to Prescott over the years echo her view of the late 1970s as the turning point in her life.

“Since her divorce she’s become more of a free spirit,” says her nephew Bucky E. Brandt, a 10th-grade high school teacher in Vermont, who has given her advice on how to make her new book appeal to high school students.

What had started simply as a personal amusement became a serious pursuit and brought her in touch with established scholars. Seeing academics close up, Prescott became convinced academics are too often unwilling to explore new avenues.

“They won’t plough new ground or be adventurous—there is too much risk taking,” Prescott says. “I was able to take risks. I feel like I’m really living.”

At her home in Pinole, Calif., she continues to be involved in community issues, in particular education and housing for the poor. She recently lobbied for tobacco settlement money to fund a family health program and visits a nearby juvenile detention center monthly to reach out to young people.

With her newfound artistic freedom, Prescott has explored a number of art forms. She plans to publish Amanda and the Dragon, a children’s story about a girl who visits a cathedral, where she finds a dragon whom she tames, as he tames her.

And after two decades of setting Chaucer to music, she thinks she’s ready to tackle a full-length musical—now that she’s wrapped up work on her Chaucer book.

“I think it’s great that at her age she has taken up this endeavor and published this book,” Brandt says, “and I think it’s something she really cares about and loves.”

—Staff writer Nalina Sombuntham can be reached at sombunth@fas.harvard.edu.