Book Review: Matrix

Lauren Groff’s construction of a powerful medieval nun

Not much is known about Marie de France, except that she wrote groundbreaking poetry that’s been much admired for 900 years. Working from her knowledge of the 12 narrative poems in The Lais of Marie de France and life in England in the 1100s, author Lauren Groff has imagined a life for this historic figure full of passionate love, staggering disappointment, surprising wit, and relentless determination to overcome the people who would hold her back — mostly religious men who outrank her in church hierarchy.

There’s also a lot of lesbian energy.

Matrix begins at the court of Henry II, whose wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie secretly loves. But Marie, a distant relation of the crown, isn’t “marriageable” — she’s outlandishly tall and stunningly ugly — so Eleanor finds her a position in a distant nunnery and sends her away from the warm pleasures of court in France (and the sumptuous Eleanor) to the miserable, drizzly gray landscape of England.

When Marie arrives, she finds the nuns starving, the abbess half crazy, and the business of the abbey grossly mismanaged. She witnesses multiple deaths the first spring she is there, apparently from a field of diseased grain stolen by starving peasants and used to bake bread.