Late to the Party: Matrix by Lauren Groff
Lush writing and queer nuns in Medieval England, what's not to like?
I can’t remember the last time I began reading a novel with such propulsive prose, I couldn’t stop reading. That is, until last week, when I picked up Matrix, a novel by Lauren Groff, which imagines the life of Marie de France. While visiting London, my mom bought me a copy, saying I had to read it. She was right. Matrix came out in 2021, so recommending it now might seem unusual in a media landscape dedicated to what’s newest, but reading exclusively on trend is not only limiting, it’s unrealistic. That’s why one of the goals for relaunching my newsletter was to spotlight what’s already out of the news cycle.
Known for writing fables and lais—poetry written in ancien français, or Old French—Marie lived in England from the late 12th to early 13th century (though she is believed to have been born in what is now France). However, not much beyond her authorship is known about her. The book takes as its premise one popular theory about Marie de France: that she was the illegitimate sister of Henry II and abbess of Shaftesbury Abbey, the first all-female religious house in England. Being born wealthy would explain her level of education at the time, which was evident in her ability to write in multiple languages, among other talents.
Historical Marie’s writing featured female characters in a more central role than was common in medieval literature, earning her a reputation as a proto-feminist writer. Groff’s Marie is spirited, fiercely devoted to the nuns in her care, and queer. In the novel, she resurrects the abbey from poverty and creates a women-centric utopia, apart from the world. Nowhere in the book is the name of a man or even the word “man” written—it is through obliqueness that men are conjured at all. The writing is lush and embroidered with historical details, yet restrained in a way that seems to evoke old language:
The nuns work until the wind pales with snow and the ground is too hard to dig, and then they enter the long dark hours of winter contemplation, yearning for the trees and open air, their bodies restless with suppressed movement and their dreams in the night full of labyrinths. They have accomplished more than Asta dared to calculate, two whole lobes of forest turned maze, from the town to the northeast to the hills to the northwest from which the wolves slink in the springtime to carry away the lambs. They finish their work in the bakery, brewery, dairy early so they can go to the woodlot to chop and stack wood, how good it feels to sweat again, for their muscles to strain in work. Their sunburns pale in the interior dim. The healthy glow of their cheeks is extinguished. Prioress Tilde watches the servants set the abbey to rights in mere days, all the floors and woodwork scrubbed and shining with polish, all the broken things mended. The manuscripts in the scriptorium that had been set aside in the outdoor work are finished with alacrity, long hours over the brevaries and psalters and missals finished and bound until there are no commissions left.1
Groff’s writing is both deeply researched and highly imaginative. The story begins with Marie as a teenager and ends just after her death. No time is wasted in long, discursive passages or side plots. Instead, the novel focuses on Marie and how she lovingly grows the Abbey to the wealthy fortress it eventually became. “Time compresses, springs forward,” Groff writes at one point, bringing the reader through years in a single sentence. It also describes the writing accurately, which somehow makes what is nearly 1,000 years old breathless and new.
P.S. Check out this imagined digital reconstruction of Shaftesbury Abbey in its heyday.
Groff, Lauren. Matrix. Random House UK, 2022, pp. 112–113.
Glad you enjoyed this amazing novel. How fun to see the Abbey as it might have been. It didn't occur to me to check. Also, didn't realize the word "man" was never used...