Disputes over the nature of truth are as old as philosophy, and the distinctions between literary and historical truth are often nebulous. This is particularly the case when the “facts” are sparse. Katherine West Scheil, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, uses documentary evidence, material culture, Shakespearean poetry and prose, and fiction and nonfiction works from the eighteenth century to discover the truth about the woman who was the wife of one of the most famous writers in the Western world. The Anne Hathaways who emerge from Scheil's research are incredibly diverse—they range from the supportive, loyal wife and good mother who kept the home fires burning and inspired Shakespeare's writings, to the haggard shrew who tricked Shakespeare into marrying her and drove him to take refuge and find womanly comforts in the urban metropolis. Because the documentary evidence about Anne's life is scant and open to interpretation, Scheil concludes, “We can never recover the real Anne” (xxii). Instead, one must flesh out the few facts that exist and imagine what she was like, both as a woman and as Shakespeare's wife.

Scheil begins her search for the real Anne by discussing the extant documents pertaining to her life. These consist of the epitaph on her grave, Shakespeare's will, three Hathaway family wills, Anne's burial notice, the Shakespeare marriage license bond, and the bishop's registry entry for the Shakespeare marriage. Very little can be determined about Anne's personal life or her marriage from this evidence, although numerous writers have come to diametrically opposed conclusions about Anne's temperament and her relationship with William citing these very documents. Similarly, Scheil shows how Anne's homes (the Hathaway family cottage at Shottery and New Place, the Shakespeares’ house in Stratford where Anne lived the last twenty-six years of her life) have been used to concoct stories of the couple's courtship and marriage.

The interest in Anne Hathaway Shakespeare derives from a desire to know more about William Shakespeare, since the documentary evidence about his personal life is also incredibly sparse. He wrote sonnets and plays, not autobiography, and this lacuna has tempted biographers to use his literary works to deduce his views on many subjects, including his relationship with his wife. Thus, Anne has been portrayed as the inspiration for an extraordinary assortment of Shakespeare's female characters, good and evil. These Annes appear not only in fictional accounts of Shakespeare but also in works purporting to be historical biographies, which Scheil prefers to call biofiction.

In Imagining Shakespeare's Wife, Scheil examines over a hundred works of biography, historical criticism, and fiction to show how the representations of Anne Hathaway reflect the authors’ views of Shakespeare and the milieu that shaped his literary creations. She begins with the 1709 “Account” of Shakespeare by Nicholas Rowe, where Anne appears as the “’Daughter of one Hathaway’” whom Shakespeare “‘thought fit to marry while he was yet very Young’” (quoted on 101). By choosing to marry the daughter of a well-off yeoman, Shakespeare is portrayed as a man who carefully planned his private and public life. But later biographers did not always see Shakespeare's marriage as a wise decision. Edmond Malone, writing a century later (his biography was published posthumously in 1821), puts forward a very different view of William and Anne's relationship, contending that Shakespeare regretted his youthful indiscretion and marriage and left Stratford as soon as he was able to find personal and professional fulfillment in London. Malone's evidence for this failed marriage is Shakespeare's will, which leaves Anne only the “second best bed.” As Scheil is quick to note, Malone conveniently ignores the inscription on Anne's grave, which describes Anne as a loving and devoted mother. This “desire to separate Shakespeare's literary life from his Stratford wife, and to relegate her to the category of a shrewish mistake” (105) was reiterated by later authors, and it most notably appears in Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004). Scheil finds it misleading to label Greenblatt's work as biography since much of his story about the Shakespeares is clearly fictional. She wonders why a contemporary author would offer such a negative presentation of Anne given the lack of evidence to support such a description. Her conclusion: “there is an alarming correlation between constructing a Shakespeare for a popular audience and offering a pejorative portrayal of Anne Hathaway” (159).

Authors’ views of gender identities, roles, and relations have also influenced their representations of Anne. Elizabeth Griffith's The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (1775) requires a virtuous, domestic helpmeet whom Shakespeare marries for love. Anna Jameson's Shakespeare's Heroines: Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832), Emma Severn's Anne Hathaway, or Shakespeare in Love (1845), and Mary Cowden Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1850) all portray Anne as the ideal Victorian woman who creates the secure domestic life underlying Shakespeare's literary success. Indeed, when the Hathaway cottage was opened to the public in the nineteenth century, family member Mary Baker provided visitors with romantic descriptions of the couple's courtship and shows them the “courting chair” where Anne inspired romantic poetry and settings that would later appear in William's plays. Twentieth-century feminist writers often use Anne as an example of one woman's success in escaping the patriarchal society of her times to create an independent life for herself. One of the best examples of this liberated Anne is found in Germaine Greer's biography, Shakespeare's Wife (2007). Anne not only maintains the family unit while her husband is away in London, but she engages in household production contributing to the family purse and enabling the purchase of New Place.

As Scheil concludes, the afterlife of Anne Hathaway continues to flourish in the twenty-first century, demonstrating the contested nature of literary and historical truth. Imagining Shakespeare's Wife is a meticulously researched and persuasively written analysis of the ways “facts” can be manipulated to construct diametrically opposed lives for both Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare.