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.