In this otherwise detailed novel that is true to the medieval period expect an alternative dimension of “other” – another way of a female community living in a harsh world and the defensive mechanisms put in place to protect the women and keep them free of external interference. But this book is a deeply competent and compelling melding of the two aspects together, but with a strong streak of reality that shows the good aspects, but as equally the harsh prices paid (both large and small). Critically as this is the tale of one woman’s lifetime and great intentions, it carries to the reader the deeper knowledge that ultimately things will not last forever and will change or fail.
Starting in the year 1158 Marie of France (17), aristocratic daughter (but of rape by Plantagenet royalty) will be summoned to the English Court and household of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Plans to marry her falter on her size and gawkiness, instead she is sent as putative Abbess to an extremely poor rural nunnery to live out the rest of her life. Once she stops objecting and recognises that this will be her life she starts to take things into her hands. Painfully, year by year, she improves the community and its assets and is able to build both better buildings to live in but a more secure day to day life rather one under the constant threat of poverty and hunger. This wealth makes the nunnery a target to be asset stripped by men of power. To resist and keep the residents safer she persuades the women of her community to engage in the building of a labyrinth to encircle the priory lands and prevent uninvited visitors. This attempt does not go unchallenged.
This novel is about how a community of women might live – the policies the principles, but also the daily reality, because ultimately women are not working machines but living, thinking and loving people. How does a community function? Who will make the decisions? And who will get them enacted in the longer term? As women age do their friendships and relationships alter, especially as new “others” enter the community and might want to challenge the ways of doing things? But ultimately this novel is centred on one woman who while working in a creative way and supporting a community of women is unable at a deeper level to achieve her own deepest desires of love, family and wider choices.
Take away the historical background and this is still a novel that challenges every woman as to how she lives her life in the shorter and longer term. It is about while living essentially one’s own “private” life for better or worse being integrated within a much larger and wider community. It is about how to try and build consensus and not just insist from a position of perceived power, it is about recognising that actions have consequences and having to live with them. But it is ultimately how one melds the big and small things, and demands of life, to try and create the best life for oneself, one’s friends, and for the community around.

Using the name of poetess from the 12th century that we know virtually nothing about Lauren Groff has created a fiction that Marie De France was a tall, ungainly, lesbian, illegitimate half sister to Eleanor of Acquitane who banishes Marie at age 17 to an improvished English convent as Prioress. Shocked at the poverty, hunger and mismanagement at the Nunnery, Marie soon puts her education and societal connections to good use, attracting rich postualnts, retired widows, wealthy sponsors and puts the Abbey lands to profitable use. The Abbey becomes wealthy and powerful and eventually Marie organises a wall to built around it and its land sealing it off from the outside with men banished from its precincts.

I really wanted to love this book. the story intrigued me but it just didn't click with me. I found the writing a bit flat and didatic. It didn't go to places that were unexpected or enthrall me. Marie's character took up so much space that the other nuns who she was often intimately involved with were unknown in their characters. It all just felt dull and too long. To be honest, I was glad to reach the end.

Matrix ~ by Lauren Groff
4.5⭐

An incredibly difficult book to review! And one I've wrestled with for over a week. Time spent contemplating my complex reaction to the writing, and the themes.

To the Goodreads reviewer who called it 'Girlboss Fantasia' I see you 🙌
Because this one definitely has the feel of a Netlix feel good series charting the rise of a powerful woman's empire!
Think less spiritual and more practical, this one follows Marie de France, the elusive woman that history has kept secret! Historians only have her name and her writings, because she was the first medieval female poet renowned for her Lais (short narrative poems) about courtly love, and contrasting the positive and negative actions that can result from affairs of the heart. But that leaves a huge gap to be filled by a creative mind in bringing her character to life!

Using incredible poetic licence, the author creates a vividly painted character. Unlikeable in the way that everything she does succeeds. Marie is scorned by her love interest and sent to live in a crumbling Abbey, where the nuns are all starving and things are falling apart, and miraculously seventeen year old Marie starts making a series of changes which result in the wealth of the Abbey soaring, and everything succeeding.
There are no challenges. There are no set backs. This one reads like a fairytale...

But 👀
What if.....
Marie de France was also known for translating Aesop's fables. Tales with hidden moral meaning.
What if this fictional story of Marie's life is allegorical?
A community of women isolated from the world. Creating an illusionary meandering path around the Abbey to deter all visitors, and create an impregnable fortress, including the Queen. A place where men are banished. An island.

And yet, the pursuit of the spiritual appears to be neglected, in the pursuit of building wealth and an empire to rival the crown. Personal glory and success celebrated, irrespective of the casualties. Strategic power moves exulted over gentle teaching. And the final act of dying alone leaves that empire in others hands...

What lesson can be drawn from this?

Let me know when you pick it up because I need to chat!

Very loosely based on the character of the 12th century mystic Marie de France, this novel imagines the story of the unnaturally tall and ungainly bastard half-sister to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Deemed too plain to make a good marriage, at the age of 17 she is sent to run an unnamed English abbey. On her arrival, already gutted to be sent away from the court, she is dismayed to find poverty and disease among the strict rule of the abbey.

There is an understandable initial period of rebellion and depression, but coming as she does from a family of female crusaders, it isn't too long before she sets about improving things, finding her faith along the way. The depiction of life in the abbey is startlingly contemporary in terms of its politics. Over the years, this community of women, under Marie's guidance, becomes self-sufficient and hugely wealthy thanks to postulants from rich families and wealthy widows who retire there. Marie cultivates influential sponsors, has a wide network of spies bringing her news of the royal family, wars and the fortunes of the country, and expands the abbey into a self-contained court and estate which in its own way rivals the royal one. In accepting her fate, she grows into a power far greater than she would have had as a married mother risking an early death in childbirth.

The gender politics and religious views are also resolutely contemporary. In a community of women, it is inevitable that same-sex relations will be present, but rather than being regarded as sinful they are tolerated as a necessary physical outlet. More problematic within the community as time goes on are Marie's mystic visions, which start around the time of her menopause. By any mainstream Christian yardstick, some of her interpretations are probably heretical, as are some of her decisions such as celebrating Mass and taking confessions herself when the male chaplains who served the community die in a fire.

Marie is an interesting character, but the book as a whole left me rather underwhelmed. It is narrated very chronologically, is very focussed on Marie at the expense of character development of the other nuns, and I found it hard to believe that any community of women in the 12th century would have had the freedoms described here, however wealthy their assets and powerful their abbess. It just felt a bit long and didn't really hold any surprises to keep me gripped. And in amongst the mostly broad sweep of the narrative, there is a fair bit of detailed description of same-sex physical relations which felt gratuitous in its detail, and out of keeping with the overall narrative style. This is an OK read but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it specially.

By coincidence, this is the second book in a row I’ve read which features the lives of women confined, initially against their will, in a convent. The first was Learwife, and while both are poetic and almost dreamlike, this book by Lauren Groff is by far my favourite of the two because amongst the lyricism she also tells a cracking story.
Groff has written a fictional biography of the 12th-century mystic, poet and visionary Marie de France. In imagining the life of this C12th nun, she creates a wonderful novel about ambition, love and the power of sisterhood.
Sent unwillingly into the hard life of an impoverished convent, Marie gradually finds her purpose in one of the few places outside of court where women could wield real power and make use of their talents and creativity. What at first seemed like a prison sentence is in fact a rare opportunity, and one in which Marie and those she befriends thrive.
Groff brings to life a world both very different to our own but also entirely relatable, particularly in the way even high ranking women faced so many difficulties and challenges. A world where Marie’s ugliness is almost an asset. Having made her almost unmarriageable she’s told by one nun that instead of marriage and a likely early death in childbirth, she’s been able to go on to have a long and productive life.
I loved this book, one of my favourites of the year so far.
One minor issue, I’m not sure if there’s a glossary in the book but in my ARC there wasn’t one, and I would have found it very useful to have had this and perhaps a short explanation of C12th abbey life.
With thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in return for an honest review.

Lauren Groff’s Matrix was my most anticipated book of 2021. I was captivated by the synopsis, and intrigued as to how a writer like Groff, who has only written very contemporary fiction before, would handle the distant twelfth-century past; I hoped this would avoid the ponderousness that drags down a lot of historical fiction, and lead to more freedom and inventiveness with the subject-matter. I’m also obsessed with novels about nuns at the moment: current favourites include Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede (modern) and Sarah Dunant’s Sacred Hearts (early modern). Could Matrix possibly live up to all these expectations?

The answer is: yes, almost! Groff’s novel returns to a lot of the themes that novels about women’s religious communities are well-placed to explore: female solidarity, solitude, duty, sexuality. Unlike Godden’s and Dunant’s novels – which have protagonists, but which are very much ensemble stories – Groff focuses completely on the dominant figure of Marie herself, and how she transforms the abbey in her own image. (Marie has at least one historical counterpart; I knew nothing about this when I read the novel, so it didn’t affect my experience of it, but other reviewers have explained the background well). Marie is both this novel’s strength and its weakness. Groff, refreshingly, isn’t interested in depicting women who get their comeuppance for exercising power, and while there are twists and turns in Marie’s life, she remains fiercely defiant. There’s more than a trace of Nicola Griffith’s Hild in her exceptional stature and intelligence. However, by exalting Marie, Groff misses the opportunity to more fully explore the lives of the other nuns and novices – and so presents a less interesting and less complex version of the convent as social community than do Godden and Dunant. She also goes full throttle on lesbian nuns, which – while I’m never going to complain there are too many lesbians in a book – focuses very much on sex between women rather than other aspects of close romantic attachment, and feels a bit like it was dropped in to be daring.

This also emerges in the way that Matrix is written. Groff skips across great swathes of years very quickly, relating the progress of the abbey to Marie’s own life, and particularly to her own biological ageing, as she suffers with painful periods and then with an early menopause. Even dramatic incidents don’t hold the pace back for too long; we are always moving forward. I thought that this worked beautifully in telling Marie’s own story, but again, less well in capturing the everyday texture of life at the abbey. There are also odd lacunae; I wanted to know more about how Marie initially resigned herself to the convent, and her turn to her Marian faith. All in all, this is not the best novel about nuns I’ve read, but it’s certainly one to add to reading lists.

A wild and lovely recreation of what it might have been like to be Marie de France, conveniently sent to a run-down and not expected to survive, as an illegitimate daughter of the crown. But Marie gradually resigns herself to her position and takes control of the whole estate, creating a highly defended 'island of women' under her power and protection.

Such a vividly told story takes you deep into monastic life in 12th century England, with a very modern spin on how the society was set up and developed to care for all types of women and to protect their rights in a time when women had none.

Marie is brought vividly to life, from her family history of her wild aunts to her relationship with Elinor of Acquitaine and her increasingly protective care for her flock which steps far beyond the bounds of what was acceptable of a woman at the time.

Absolutely one of my favourite books of the year - I adored Fates and Furies so had high hopes for Matrix. I found it so interesting and unusual though I was warned not to rely too much on the veracity of the story as factual information on Marie de France is thin on the ground. Its a pleasure to believe though and I am certainly a happy convert!

This beautifully written mystical fiction is loosely based upon the historical figure Marie de France, the 12th century poet, and how her life may have unfolded. Marie, the ungainly and overly tall half-sister of Eleanor of Aquitaine is considered by the queen as too plain to marry well, and dismissed from court to live in a crumbling abbey. When Marie arrives, she finds the abbey a desolate place, the nuns are starving and struggling with disease, abuse and poverty, and yet Marie makes the best of her situation and turns it around whilst coping with hardships and jealousies and learning to live with the rituals of the religious order.

This book packs a lot in, and yet not a word is wasted; love, pain, death, heresies and devotions interweave through bold and striking prose, and I'd not be surprised to see it on the prize longlists.

I had absolutely no idea what was going on in Matrix, but I didn’t hate it. The nuns of the story are an excellent cast of characters, complex and definitely not always saintly, who suggest that convent life is a diverse one with a space for everyone, even in the 12th century. But my lack of knowledge of (and interest in) Marie de France, the crusades, or even Christianity meant that Matrix dragged a little for me. And I struggled to get to the end. As Groff so eloquently puts it: ‘Life slows. Time is wheels within wheels.’

‘For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.’

My advanced reader copy of Matrix came with the all-caps tagline: MEET THE INDOMITABLE MARIE DE FRANCE. However, there is but a mere soupçon of Marie de France in this well-wrought tale, so to any stans out there: this might be a letdown.

Not much is known about Marie, other than she was 12th century French poetess who wrote a collection of lais (short narrative poems) about courtly romance, with a fairytale bent. Which is why it’s strange that Groff disposes of these scant biographical details early on in this novel. Groff’s Marie dashes off the lais as an angsty teenager, her fledgling artistic tendencies are squashed, she moves on to nunnier pastures.

There is a theory (not proven) that the poetess Marie de France and another historical personage, the English abbess Mary of Shaftesbury were in fact one and the same. Even less is known about Mary, the half-sister of Henry II, but in any case, Groff was clearly more jazzed by writing about a boss-woman of a huge abbey so here we are. Less de France, more Shaftesbury.

‘Fine then, she thinks with bitterness. She will stay in this wretched place and make the best of the life given her. She will do all that she can do to exalt herself on this worldly plane. She will make those who cast her out sorry for what they’ve done. One day they will see the majesty she holds within herself and feel awe.’

Matrix is a big-budget, prestige-TV Gwendoline Christie vehicle in novel form. It is a fantasy version of history, in which Marie’s inexorable, inevitable rise to power is parcelled out in sumptuous, bingeable segments, each one presenting a new set of challenges and ending with Marie triomphante. As enjoyable and lushly written as Matrix is, Groff has, in Marie, written a heroine so superior, so literally INDOMITABLE, that the novel is shorn of its emotional potency. You expect her to win. She does. She’s also a total chick-magnet.

Subversive enough to include a scene where novices take turns ‘playing Judith’ with a severed head, Matrix is nonetheless fun, feminist, blessedly escapist historical fiction. 4 stars.

I fear this might be a case of the wrong book at the wrong time but this novel didn't quite do it for me.

I am a big fan of Lauren Groff, and I like her willingness to write books that are so different from one another. With this one though, I felt as if all her beautiful sentences were building to nowhere. I know that I am an outlier in this experience. Many people find this work moving and the wonderful descriptions are enjoyed immensely by them. But, while sumptuous I never gave myself over to these descriptions. I expected more from this. Perhaps that's not fair, but we can't always avoid expectations. I was, dare I say, uninterested for large parts of this. My mind kept wandering and it just fell a bit flat.

I will seek her next novel when it comes, but this one was a miss for me. Still nothing less than 3 stars will do for she knows language well and there are many quotable passages.

My thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France. It is 1158 …She sees for the first time the abbey, pale and aloof on a rise in this damp valley, the clouds drawn up from the ocean and wrung against the hills in constant rainfall.’

My thanks to Random House U.K. Cornerstone for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Matrix’ by Lauren Groff in exchange for an honest review.

This was my first experience of Lauren Groff’s writing, though I have been aware for some time that she is a highly regarded American author. I was impressed by her ability to craft this powerful work of historical fiction that focuses on the lives of religious women in medieval England.

‘Matrix’ was inspired by the life of Marie de France, a 12th-century poet and translator of Aesop’s Tales. Very little is known about Marie’s life though given her level of education it is considered likely that she was a noblewoman. There is also speculation among historians that Marie was Mary, the Abbess of Shaftesbury Abbey and half-sister to Henry II.

Lauren Groff has embraced this theory and also has Marie descended from a long line of women warriors and crusaders. She is considered too coarse for courtly life and so is sent away to grotty Angleterre to take up duties as prioress of an impoverished abbey.

It’s pretty bleak in soggy ole Angleterre and Marie initially pines for France and the Court, for her secret lover Cecily, and for Queen Eleanor to whom she is very attached. Still, she isn’t one to mope and works hard to inspire her new sisters to change the fortunes of the Abbey.

Over the years she comes to realise that through her position she actually wields more power than she could ever have imagined. She is not particularly religious when she first enters the Abbey, yet she almost imperceptibly finds faith, especially in terms of devotion to the Virgin Mary. She begins to experience powerful visions from the Virgin that guides her work.

When I was studying European history I was quite surprised to learn how much influence women in religious orders held. I was pleased that Lauren Groff has highlighted this important role for medieval women.

As I only had access to an advance copy there was no Author’s Note or Acknowledgements that might provide background on the novel. However, I discovered that medieval historian Katie Bugyis served as Groff’s historical consultant for the novel. Bugyis’ specialty is medieval religious women in England and so a partnership that ensured that the novel was grounded in solid historical research.

In addition to this well executed premise, Lauren Groff’s writing is evocative and lyrical; a pleasure to read (and listen to).

After this positive experience I now plan to explore Lauren Groff’s back catalogue.

I didn't enjoy this book. It was slow, long winded and I didn't really feel any connection or care for any of the characters and I didn't even really know who was who. I slowly became more disinterested in the story as it went on and struggled to finish it.

I was sent a copy of Matrix by Lauren Groff to read and review by NetGalley. I’m afraid I did not finish this book. I got about a third of the way through and decided I wasn’t enjoying it at all. The premise of the story captured my imagination enough to request the title but unfortunately it did not live up to my expectations. I found the writing to be very detached and quite monotone, and the more I read the more I found that I wasn’t interested at all and didn’t care about what happened. If the prose had been written in a different way, with rather more feeling, I may have persevered. As it was I found the novel quite soulless – quite ironic given the subject matter!

I enjoyed the theme of the book and the premise - Marie 'de France', a 12th century nun and author of lais of which very little is known - and although I really enjoyed Lauren Groff's writing - sparse, lyrical, minimalist -, I feel at times it didn't serve the story and did not help to create a connection with its main character. There are many many ellipsis between Marie's arrival at the abbey at seventeen and her death at seventy-two. She is presented as a sort of superhero - after her death, some nuns call her a saint and recall her achievements with much exageration, and the whole story feels like it is written that way: she moves the abbey from poverty and hunger to wealth and power, builds an amazing labyrinth around it, defends her land... Her personal thoughts and feelings remained quite mysterious and I would have liked to see them explored more deeply: her relationship with other nuns (romantic relationships, professional relationships, etc), her visions (which are described but feel out of place after early pages during which Marie is said not to be very religious and not to believe in God)... It was enjoyable but something was missing.

I have loved everything I’ve read by Lauren Groff but I won’t lie to you, this was a slog. What I normally love about her writing is how she manages to convey her characters’ thoughts and feelings; presenting their (sometimes conflicting) accounts almost in parallel. ‘Matrix’ is more like an extended character study over a long period of time - except I didn’t feel like I ever really understood Marie, because it was all very surface level. It might not have helped that I didn’t know she was a historical figure until I’d finished reading, but having now read a little about her that hasn’t added much retrospectively - except impress me with the thoroughness of Groff’s research. I suppose objectively a few things happened, but it seemed like nothing to me, and definitely not anything I couldn’t sum up in a few short sentences. Which is a shame, as the premise - which we don’t really find out about until the last 10-20 pages; another disappointment - is very interesting, and the book had a lot of potential. I’m not the biggest fan of historical fiction, so maybe I should’ve born that in mind, but I thought if anyone could do it well, it was Groff. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s the case here - although I will continue to read her contemporary fiction. If you like a (very) slow burner, then you may enjoy it, but it wasn’t for me.

I think this is the type of book you just have to read yourself as it almost defied description! I was fascinated when reading it but when I came to wrote my review I struggled to remember what actually happened. I'd say this is the kind of read that you experience - it's somehow extremely engaging while also keeping you at a distance. Either way, I loved it!

Marie, a giant ungainly girl born after a Plantagenet assault on her teenage mother, is unwillingly sent away from court to be the prioress of an impoverished abbey. She makes the best of it and grows to love the cloistered female-led life, improving the abbey with her leadership and ambition.

The title Matrix is clever, meaning mother/womb in Latin but also “an organizational structure in which two or more lines of command, responsibility, or communication may run through the same individual” in English. Very suitable for a book about a religious mother and leader with a network of spies.

An enjoyable book, recommended for readers of historical fiction.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

What a piece of storytelling - wild and beautiful, emotive and powerful, Matrix was mesmerising and it will take a long time to get over it. Marie is a poet, a leader, a visionary and a lover, but mostly she is a woman making the best of the circumstances she finds herself in, ultimately trying to protect the nuns in her care and maintain her position. A book about female power, creativity and unwillingness to accept the status quo, it reminded me of The Power, which is never a bad comparison! When will this be made into a mini-series??