Marie finds religion “vaguely foolish,” even “senseless,” but can’t escape “the desire of both god and the queen.” At the royal abbey, Marie is confronted with poverty and plague, yet she will miraculously multiply her community, their wealth, their power, their joy. She presents herself to Empress Matilda, wife of her rapist father, who sends Marie to be civilized “across the channel to her legitimate half-sibling’s royal court at Westminster.” Yet Queen Eleanor, the half-sister-in-law for whom Marie will always yearn, deems Marie “three heads too tall … a creature absent of beauty” and “anyone with eyes could see she had always been meant for holy virginity.” Marie needs no man: she’s already proven herself capable of running her family estate as a tetra-lingual polyglot with accounting skills. In 1158, 17-year-old “poor illegitimate Marie from nowhere in Le Maine had at last been made prioress of a royal abbey.” Marie was born in France to a 15-year-old raped by a royal, and purged from her home after surviving two years without family following her mother’s death. From minimal details, Groff produces a sublime examination of a woman’s subversive refusal – almost a millennium ago – to be constrained by what society deemed forbidden. Groff finds narrative inspiration in one of Marie’s possible identities: Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury, who was also King Henry II’s half-sister.

In a surprising feat of time travel, the two-time National Book Award finalist (for Fates and Furies and Florida) leaps back to 12th-century England in Matrix and fictionalizes the life of Marie de France, believed to be the first woman to write poetry in French.

Lauren Groff has built a significant career crafting novels and stories featuring sharp observations by and about modern women.

The matrix by lauren groff