![]() ![]() Across 50 years it prospers with Marie, its matrix – Latin for mother – binding it all together. ![]() But resourceful, ambitious Marie is in the right place: her warrior-like strength of heart and body allows her to wrestle the defenceless abbey back from the brink. Arriving at the abbey, Marie finds infertile lands and nuns sick and starving. To complicate matters further, she’s in love with the queen. Marie is decreed unfit for marriage – ‘three heads too tall’ and too ugly for royal life. It’s 1158, and Marie, the 17-year-old illegitimate daughter of Henry II, is banished from the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine to head an abbey on the fringes of England. Matrix is a bold feminist tale of what Marie’s life might have looked, smelled and felt like. But in her latest novel, Lauren Groff generously imagines a complete, alternative life thrashing inside those silences. Scour the formal historical record and you won’t find much about the woman known as Marie de France beyond information that she lived in the 12th century and wrote a series of Breton lais, or short romantic rhymes. ![]()
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