12th century sisterhood is powerful in Groff ’s ‘Matrix’
In her 2018 story collection, “Florida,” Lauren Groff gave readers an unexpected and indelible portrait of the state she has lived in for years.
Her new novel, “Matrix,” takes us to another world entirely, but one Groff paints just as confidently, and surprisingly.
The book begins in the year 1158 as a 17-year-old girl rides out of a forest on a winter day and catches her first sight of an isolated abbey — the last place she wishes to be, but the place where she will likely spend the rest of her life.
Her name is Marie, and Groff based her on a historical person, Marie de France, believed to be the first woman to write poetry in French. Almost nothing is known about her life, not even her true identity. But Groff gives her fictional Marie a rich and intriguing story.
Born to one of seven sisters, “a famous family of viragoes,” Marie, like her mother and aunts, has skills uncommon among women in the Middle
Ages. Not only can she read and write in several languages, she can fight with a sword, hunt with a bow and arrow and ride a warhorse. As a child, she accompanied her family on one of the Crusades.
Her beloved mother died when Marie was 12, and the girl was stripped of her mother’s property and sent to live at the royal English court.
That might seem an unlikely fate for an orphan, but Marie’s mother was raped at age 13 by the father of Henry II, so
Marie is the “bastardess half sister” (well, one of them) of the king.
Marie doesn’t much care
about the king, but she is dazzled by his queen, Eleanor of Aquitane, “all bosom and golden hair and sable fur lining the blue robe and jewels dripping from ears and wrists and shining chapelet and perfume strong enough to knock a soul to the ground.” Eleanor is much more than a pretty face — she is one of the most powerful women in Europe.
She seems at a loss, however, to find a suitable husband for Marie: “She, a rustic gallowsbird? Three heads too tall, with her great rough stomping about, with her terrible deep voice, her massive hands and her disputations and her sword practicing?”
Instead, the queen tells Marie, she will become the prioress of a remote royal abbey: “Anyone with eyes could see she had always been meant for holy virginity.”
Being sent to a convent was not an unusual destiny for women in those times. Some girls became nuns out of a deep spiritual vocation, but many were sent off by their families as damaged goods, too mentally or physically disabled, too rebellious or promiscuous, too inconvenient a stepchild or unattractive a daughter. The families, many of them aristocratic, paid a dowry to the abbey, and the abbey gained another pair of hands for the constant work there.
The abbey Marie enters as both novice and prioress is in bad shape. Only about 20 nuns, many of them sickly, live there, starving amid a famine. The building is rundown, the surrounding farm neglected. The abbess, Emme, is nearly blind and “terrifically mad, if in a kindly way.”
After her shock and sorrow wear off, Marie begins to find her way into life at the abbey. She is first assigned to sort out its account books and discovers its poverty has more to do with unpaid rents on its lands than with spiritual aims, a problem she promptly solves.
Later she replaces the abbey’s unprofitable silk making with a scriptorium, where literate nuns copy books by hand. The abbey undercuts the price charged for the same work by monks at a nearby monastery and soon has another solid income stream.
Under Marie’s leadership — she is chosen to be abbess after Emme’s death — the abbey grows and becomes self-sufficient, and its women learn that isolation from the world of men brings them many kinds of power.
In her lyrical novel “Arcadia,” about a 1970s commune, Groff examined the tension between the individual and the group; in her brilliant “Fates and Furies,” she focused on a woman taking control of her own story. In “Matrix” she brings those paths together in an unforgettable vision.