What an amazing read - great subject matter, very interesting - 12th Century, strong female characters . Original .. Well written. Recommended.

This book was a literal delight. It was beautiful, consuming and the sapphic elements are to die for. I love reading books that assigned personalities to characters in history. It just so happens that the character of Marie, not much is known of her through history, so Groff did an absolutely stunning job of writing her back into history. I’m enthralled.

Low star rating reflects on the quality of the ebook arc, which every other page was incredibly difficult to read, and this really spoilt my enjoyment because the book just didn't flow for me. Having said that I would like to pick up a proper copy because I found characters well-written, and the scene setting really built a great sense of place and the hardships faced. Realistically if I'd been able to read this as a flowing story, and able to keep my place I'd probably rate at 4 stars for the writing, but I didn't feel I really got fully into the story.

Update after the publisher kindly sent me a physical copy: This is a lyrical, evocative book, which never shys away from the stark reality of C12th life. Marie is a formidable character, well drawn and fully realised - at times tender and loving, at others practical and determined, and at others again, desperate to do what she feels is right with a sense of omnipotence.

This is beautifully written, rich with detail of Medieval life that is embedded in each page to bring that world to life in all it's beauty and hardship. (Star rating updated to reflect this review)

Matrix ~ late 14c., matris, matrice, "uterus, womb," from Old French matrice "womb, uterus" and directly from Latin mātrix (genitive mātricis) "pregnant animal," in Late Latin "womb," also "source, origin," from māter (genitive mātris) "mother"
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An appropriate title for a book about a community of women and female power centred around the 12th Century figure of Marie de France. Marie was a real woman, one of the first known French linguists and poets, but little is known of her and this story has been woven out of the remaining snippets of her life that echo through 800 years of history


Marie de France is an Amazonian women that comes from a line of female crusaders. Tall, strong and fearless she is considered uncouth at the French court of Eleanor of Aquitaine and is sent away by the Queen that she loves and admires, to England to be the Prioress of a royal Abbey. The Abbey is floundering in a mire of disease and poverty. Where first she sees a banishment, Marie grows to see an opportunity for garnering power and influence, in part to make Eleanor notice her


Reading this felt a little like being on a train journey moving through Marie’s life with energetic forward momentum, but stopping off along the way to examine particular episodes in more detail. We see Marie succeed to Abbess and there are moments when her ambition threatens to undermine her successes. She cleverly spreads the sphere of the Abbey’s influence and once she considers the Abbey to be almost untouchable, she grows a living labyrinth around the convent to protect her community of sisters. Later in life she starts to have visions, noting these down in writing and hinting, no doubt heretically at the time, that the divine may be female


The 800 years separating us and Marie melt away reading Matrix. There are many reasons that this book appeals to me, I often seem drawn to books set in the Middle or Medieval Ages. I enjoy books about disparate communities forced together for a common reason (whether that’s an asylum or a convent) and I love learning about figures on the fringes of history in the context of fiction. Matrix also reminded me of another book that I enjoyed, The Corner that Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner, but Matrix with it’s centrifugal force of Marie de France was, for me, the more enjoyable read.


Huge thanks to the publisher and tp NetGalley for allowing me to access an early eARC for Matrix that is due out in September

Twelfth century France, Marie, a seventeen-year-old royal bastard and recent orphan, travels to the court of the magnificent Queen Eleanor. But Marie de France is tall, energetic, clever, willful and considered to be manly. She does not fit at court and Queen Eleanor soon sends her off to England to become a prioress of a nunnery despite having shown no previous piety, or deep religious interest.
Marie feels abandoned. She loves Queen Eleanor and England is cold, the nunnery on the brink of famine. No one there expects anything of her. They are wrong.
A wonderfully rich novel filled with the female religious fervour and creativity of hagiographies and Marie’s own publication of poems (the real Marie de France published twelve short narrative verses about courtly love), Matrix is also about power and desire.
Marie is a delightful character whose strength floods the book with refreshing feminism, exploring how women were able to garner power and influence at a time when they were considered the weaker sex. Queen Eleanor too harnesses myth and story to enhance her power, teaching Marie, understanding Marie’s potential.
It’s an absorbing story that explores the complexities of power and wealth from a female perspective. You’ll know if this is your thing. I found myself fully immersed in Marie’s world, in the patterns of prayer, service and land ownership that require buildings and defenses. You’ll need to read it to enjoy the full meaning of the title.
A masterful piece of historical fiction that knows just where to pull its punches for a wide readership. I haven’t read any of Lauren Groff’s other work, but I would do so now.

I’m sorry to say that I didn’t enjoy this book at all. It may just be that I don’t often read historical fiction, but I found the plot, the setting and the characters impossible to connect to. I even struggled with the style of writing, which read like a list in places. I appreciate the opportunity to read this and apologise that I didn’t enjoy it.

This is based on the life of real 12th Century poet Marie de France. Very little is known about her, including whether or not Marie is her real name.

Eleanor of Acquitane casts Marie out of France at the age of seventeen to live in a shambolic, run-down Abbey in England. Marie is initially devastated not only at this rejection by Eleanor (who she seems to have a thing for) but also at the state of the Abbey. This makes her question her faith, but as time goes on, she decides to make the best of her situation and try to turn things around at the Abbey. She does, in spectacular fashion, and I've no real idea how she did that because the pacing is funny. At one point four years go by in one page.

Marie begins to have visions from the Virgin Mary telling her what she needs to do to save herself and the other women from the end of Christianity. The writing is lovely, Lauren Groff definitely knows how to write historical fiction (as we saw with her Greek mythology in Fates and Furies) but I just don't have enough knowledge of this time period to appreciate this to the fullest extent.

There were SO many characters to keep track of. Dozens of nuns, none with any unique identifiers (except the mean one who wanted to lash the pregnant woman). There's a lot of very graphic stuff in here - there's a childbirth scene that's very upsetting so that's something to keep in mind.

My main issue was that by the end of the book, even though we had supposedly just gone through a woman's entire life, I didn't know her as a human being. At the beginning, she was motivated by survival, then by Eleanor's rejection, then by the visions, then by proving a point - I just felt like she was really detached. Even during the parts where she had relationships with others or dalliances with some of the women - although the scenes were written beautifully I didn't feel much emotion from Marie. And that's fine, maybe she wasn't an emotional person, but I just couldn't figure her out and as a result had very little interest in her.

If you like historical fiction, prize winning books (because I'm sure this will be nominated for several), or books that fall under the literary fiction genre, then you might get on better with this. I just don't have the brain power to keep track of this many nuns at the minute, unfortunately.

I need to say that my 2-star rating is entirely subjective (what else would it be?) and that other readers liked this far more than me. I would venture to add that the less one knows of Marie de France and her writings, the easier it might be to fall into this book. In fact, the hook of 'Marie de France' is precisely that, a hook on which to hang a story that could have been about any modern fantasy of a powerful medieval woman's life - it doesn't really touch base with what we learn about the real Marie from her writings, more of which later.

What I enjoyed about this book, particularly at the start, is the energetic writing. Groff almost figuratively encapsulates her story on the opening page: 'in the fields, the seeds uncurl in the dark cold soil, ready to punch into the freer air' - just as Marie, only seventeen, is the 'seed' of the powerful woman she will become, working through the 'cold dark' of the abbey to 'punch' her way to some kind of freedom. There are also some lovely snappy descriptions that made me smile: on the first appearance of Eleanor, for example:
"Queen Eleanor had appeared in the doorway of Marie's chamber, all bosom and golden hair and sable fur lining the blue robe and jewels dripping from ears and wrists and shining chaplet and perfume strong enough to knock a soul to the floor."

However, almost immediately we're removed from the court and Marie's life in an abbey just didn't fundamentally grab me: she starts off by questioning Christianity (not really a position available for a medieval person) but then later becomes devout, writing of her spiritual visions, without the transition really coming to life. Similarly, Marie has a super-hero trajectory where she almost single-handedly defeats disease, poverty, hunger, classism, misogyny and turns the abbey into a showplace all without much effort. The years flash past 'Marie is forty-five... the abbey is rich... Marie is forty-seven. From Rome, from Paris, from London her spies write swift panicked letters: Jerusalem has fallen again to the infidel. Marie weeps' (all this in half a page).

But I guess my biggest disappointment is that I came to this with the expectation that it would imaginatively fill out Marie's status as a female author and poet (not the first known French female poet - there were trobairitz, or female troubadours, before her). But in the book the Lais are written in half a page at 15% and that's it: 'What has come to Marie is a Breton lai in rhyming lines, sudden and beautiful, in its entirety. Her hands begin to shake in her lap. She will write a collection of lais, translated to the the fine musical French of the court. She will send her manuscript as a blazing arrow forward to her love and when it strikes, it will set that cruel heart afire.'

Now, I do like that this fictional Marie is in love with Eleanor and addresses her manuscript to Henry II in the hope of making Eleanor jealous, and the arrow of love/cruel heart afire is nicely medieval. But it's a sparse engagement with a female author whose authentic voice in the Prologue to her actual Lais is far more ambitious and literarily conscious:
"Anyone who has received from God the gift of knowledge and true eloquence has a duty not to remain silent [...] For this reason I began to think of working on some good story and translating a Latin text into French, but this would scarcely have been worthwhile, for others have undertaken a similar task. So I thought of lays which I had heard and did not doubt, for I knew it full well, that they were composed, by those who first began them and put them into circulation, to perpetuate the memory of adventures they had heard. I myself have heard a number of them and do not wish to overlook or neglect them. I have put them into verse, made poems from them and worked on them late into the night."
~ From Penguin Classics, The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Glyn S. Burgess

What a shame, then, that the Marie who explicitly speaks in her poems of translating narratives from Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Latin into medieval French (romanz, or franceis) so that they become memorialised isn't the Marie who appears in this novel. And her intellectual endeavours and hard work ('I worked on them late into the night') almost disappear from this novel.

So I admit there was a mismatch between my expectations and the novel that Groff has written - bear in mind that plenty of other reviewers have loved this.

Matrix is an interesting book set in a 12th century Abbey and inspired by Marie of France who was forced to lead there by the Queen. This isn't going to be for everyone, the prose can feel detached at times and the terminology can take some getting used to. Despite this it is an engaging and intriguing novel. The descriptions of the way the nuns lived their lives, the hardship they endured is fascinating. Geoff creates an immersive world that draws you in and carries across several decades.

‘In the end, the earth will crack and the wicked will be cast into the lake of fire. Marie suspects this fiery end would be the stone and the soil and the waters of the earth itself, through human folly and greed made too hot for it to be willing to bear any more life upon its back.’

I read this exquisite novel last week, and with time to think about it, I think it is one of the best novels of the year. A fictionalised tale of Marie de France, this is a beautiful work of deep historical fiction.

For someone who has mostly avoided English history, I really have read a lot of it this year. I wasn’t familiar with either Marie de France or Mary of Shaftesbury, and getting to learn more about their pieces of history alongside the novel was a fascinating experience. The key characters here are all nuns in the twelfth century, and as higher powers of the Church and of England try to reduce the power and wealth their abbey has gathered, the women go to great lengths to maintain their autonomy.

Marie as the centre of the novel is a stand out character. She is not a woman to be tested - when dumped in the falling apart abbey and forcibly separated from her lover, Cecily, and the love of her life, Eleanor of Aquitaine, she does not sit quietly. Through determination and sheer intelligence, she builds up the abbey to become what could be counted today as a feminist utopia.

For me, though, the most striking part of Matrix is how well Groff handles love - in all its various forms. Matrix is a novel of romantic, sexual, familial, platonic love - a novel of love for your home, for your past, for your God, for your future, for the people you surround yourself with and give you love in return. It is hauntingly beautiful, and Marie’s story of love will stay with me for a long time.

I really cannot recommend this enough - thank you so much to @hutchheinemann for my copy. Matrix is out in September, and you can preorder it now.

An fabulous ode to all Medieval women and all their resilience, their undeniable strength and their beautiful spirit of survival, a stupendous and mind blowing look at the bleakness of monastic life, a marvellous fictional journey and an awesome tapestry of religious life from start to finish.
Based on the life of Marie de France, a 12th century author and religious figure,
this exquisite novel will take you into an eerie but unforgettable adventure, a literary descent into an unbelievable world full of darkness, harshness & unexpected surprises....
I loved the writing! I could almost taste the prose, its cripsness and its delicious brashness. To be honest, Marie de France and her Lais bored me to death in High school in France and I never expected to come across her once again in my life, especially 40 years later, but Lauren Groff has brought her back to life in this accomplished novel with so much, yes so much vividness and gusto, that I went ahead & purchased The lais, in order to give them another chance.....
A magnificent novel and a luminous discovery that deserves to be enjoyed without any moderation whatsoever!

Many thanks to Netgalley and Random House for this terrific ARC

As a huge fan of Groff’s Florida and Fates and Furies I was so happy to read an advance copy of her new novel Matrix- thank you NetGalley and her publishers for this opportunity.
Groff rarely writes a dull sentence. Even in their simplest forms they are elegant and evocative. Smells, senses and experiences come alive and she treads an exquisite line between sentiments and sentimentality.
The subject matter of this novel is a fictionalised version of Marie de France, considered to be the first woman to write poetry in French. Set in the 12th century, little is known (unsurprisingly) about our heroines life and Groff imagines a tale of extraordinary hardship and deprivation where the young woman is sent from the French Court of Eleanor of Aquitaine to an impoverished English Abbey.
Much will be written about subtext and metaphor- the oppressors are nearly all men carrying out their lives what a sense of dazzling entitlement. The women have little to rely on apart from their wit and bravery. Goodness ultimately triumphs over adversity.
This is not a plot filled page turner but a really lovely novel for those who savour fine writing.

Blue-blooded Marie is banned from the court in a harsh ecclasiastic world. 12. century abbey, with monotone discipline, poverty and starvation is at first horrible for fearless and visionary young woman, until she unleashes her inner power and the abbey under her command starts to thrive.

Brilliant story of women courage, intelligence and power. Characters are strong, likeable and the reader root for them all the way.

With contemporary narrative just my kind of read.

It’s not often we meet a book set in the twelfth century and even less so when it is populated by all female characters. The premise is rare and I have to admit not one which would attract me but as ever have realised the rich pickings to be had when moving beyond your reading comfort zone.

This is full of sumptuous descriptions: ‘the over-rich vicious warm egg’, ‘the lutes playing in the corner, two voices weaving together in a sad song of chivalric love’ and ‘the wind blows in knives of cold’. Clearly although well removed from the settings of her previous work, Groff proves that good writing transcends all settings and stories.

In telling the life story of Marie, banished from the French court by Eleanor of Aquitaine to an English abbey 800 years ago Groff gives us a vivid biography that feels fresh showing that human nature and interactions are in many ways the same today. The story is peppered by many truisms well told which will stay with the reader e.g. ‘souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force greater than themselves,’ and ‘in any adult body, you will discover a frightened child within it. The greater the protestations of power, the smaller the child’.

This is a wonderful novel and as Groff says ‘all souls as they sing shine radiantly on the world’ – this novel shines radiantly and deserves a wide and appreciative audience.

My thanks to Random House UK for the ARC via NetGalley

The characters are beautifully written and I came to love them within the first few pages and was rooting for them all the way to the end. At times I wanted to stop reading because I just wanted the experience to go on for longer. A compelling read.

Strangely compelling, Matrix draws you into the world of a 12th Century abbey and its new, young prioress Marie. This is a mesmerising novel and Lauren Groff’s prose is almost poetic in places. Marie grows and matures through the years and nurtures her nuns and the abbey into a flourishing and profitable community. Although set in the 1100’s there are parallels to our modern world and the upheaval we are all experiencing. This is a very special book which deserves to win awards.

Matrix is a novel inspired by Marie de France, considered to be the first woman to write poetry in French, but a woman about whose life very little is known. Even her accurate identity is debatable. Here, we read the story of a 12th century woman banished from the French court by Eleanor of Aquitaine and sent to an abbey in England. Once she accepts her fate, she settles into her new life and transforms the place which leads to all kinds of questions and opposition from local leaders who are, of course, all men.

Groff is clear that although she is writing about a woman from 800+ years ago, it is, in her view, impossible to write historical fiction without at the same time writing about modern life. In The New Yorker, she says:

“To a reader, the stories would certainly seem distant in subject matter. To me, though, the same obsession with American violence and masculinity was an engine that drove the writing of “Matrix,” which took place over the gross and vulgar Trump years, loudly animated by a stupid and swaggering violent masculinity. I wanted to get as far away from Trump’s America as possible—so, a twelfth-century convent, a flawed female utopia—while also looking hard at what I see as the precursor of so much of the religious intolerance, white-male supremacy, imperialism, and climate disaster that we’re faced with today. So much about the dying American empire can be articulated by remembering that America is the unchecked outgrowth of the Crusades that took place a millennium ago.”

And so this is a book that exercises the reader’s mind on several levels. Firstly, and at a very basic level, it uses a lot of unfamiliar words that, when you look them up, begin their definition with “archaic”. Groff hasn’t tried to write in any kind of ancient English, but she has carefully researched the names of things and the words that were in use in the 12th century so that the writing has a strong feel of the time but is still perfectly comprehensible for a 21st century reader.

But there are multiple other layers at work here, I think. I spent a lot of time while reading this book searching for various phrases and connections on the Internet. I didn’t really find what the book was making me think about, but phrases like “island of women”, structures like a labyrinth and all female sexual encounters all start to tie together and left me searching for links between the story Groff has created and other famous stories about communities of women (e.g. Sappho).

And on top of this, there’s also the very obvious links to our modern day world. There’s talk of climate change and ecology/conservation.

And on top of this there’s Marie de France’s visions that guide her actions in the book and which the book posits as almost a foundation for a very different theology.

Of course, though, this is historical fiction with the emphasis (I believe) on the fiction. I searched around for Internet articles about Marie de France and didn’t come across much more than the basic facts). In an interview with Elle magazine, Groff says:

“Luckily nobody knows all that much about Marie de France. She’s a person that’s sort of shadowy. There are suppositions about her being an abbess, the illegitimate sister of the king, but again, that’s kind of a beautiful place to go, back into history, to find clues from her own records. And those scholars who’ve read Marie de France will be overjoyed to find a lot of Easter eggs throughout the book, joyous little moments that actually show up in her poems, showing up in the life of my character.”

(Not being even remotely familiar with Marie de France’s poetry, I obviously missed all these Easter eggs).

The final product here is a very readable story inventing a life for a character about whom history doesn’t know much but who was clearly a major influence. Groff really brings Marie to life for the reader whilst simultaneously giving food for thought.

A thoroughly enjoyable read. I’ll be interested to talk with other readers when the book is published in September 2021 because it would be fascinating to hear from people who know this period of history and/or the writings of Marie de France.

My thanks to Random House UK for an ARC via NetGalley.

Utterly spellbinding. Groff plunges her readers into a 12th century ecclesiastical English world as Marie de France, a bastard child of the French and English courts is shipped to a failing, starving nunnery. Marie's faith in limited but her resentment and her imagination are unbounded. Even as she pours her hatred and bitterness into the place her intelligence and ambition transform it into a thriving, powerful community of women. She becomes their leader, mother and protector, her unorthodox visions alternately empowering and endangering their way of life. Groff writes with a crispness and clarity that brings her world and her characters to live in vivid detail and it's not every author who could maintain such a grip on her readers with so little direct speech. Matrix is a powerful story of women's place in the world, now and then, and the ability of determined women to carve places for themselves even within society's strict constraints. I loved it.

Having never heard of the author Lauren Groffe before, I started this book with few expectations. But as I became engrossed in the story of Marie le France, who is sent to exile in an impoverished abbey in England, I realised I had found a true gem.

The story is set in the 12th century yet feels as familiar as any tale of power, community living and friendships. It is a woman’s world but set of course within the patriarchy of church and state that we still inhabit. There is a powerful French Queen, the beloved that Marie always is trying to get close to. There are all the wonderfully drawn vharacters of the nuns. who share their lives in the abbey environment, at first struggling with poverty and near starvation and later, when Marie has reorganised their world, sharing in the wealth and security of a successful female led community.

I loved Marie with her large body and her intelligence and wisdom. She is a character that develops, from weakness and despair to empowerment and wisdom and love.

Here is a beautiful quote that I had to read several times to savour the depth of this writing.
‘Goda has the affronted air of someone who lurks in corners to hear herself spoken ill of so that she can hold a grievance to suckle’

Now isnt life better for having read that and now being able to describe better just that sort of person?

Recommmend this book without reservation

Despite an ethereal and almost enchanting style of writing from the offset, I struggled to connect with the story and the main characters in particular. Rating reflects the immaculate written style.