The Fates and Furies author reconstructs the life of a 12th-century nun, drawing out conflict, drama and queer undercurrents
Monasteries and convents make excellent crucibles: closed worlds in which the events of a novel are heightened, their tensions felt more keenly. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a near-forgotten masterpiece set in a medieval nunnery, while Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose had metafictive fun mixing crime and semiotics. More recently, there’s been Christopher Wilson’s Hurdy Gurdy, James Meek’s To Calais, in Ordinary Time and, in a slightly skewed vision, Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep. Now we have Lauren Groff, author of the celebrated Fates and Furies, a sharp novel of New York life that drew comparisons to Gone Girl and was praised by Barack Obama. Groff’s fourth novel, Matrix, is something very different indeed: a strange and poetic piece of historical fiction set in a dreamlike abbey, the fictional biography of a 12th-century mystic.
Marie de France is a mysterious figure, a poet whose visionary lays and magical fables, written in Francien, a medieval dialect of Old French, are complex, sensual and self-lacerating. Groff has read these mystical poems and what limited historical records we have and has fashioned a life for Marie. We first meet our ungainly heroine aged 17, as she is cast out of her home; the illegitimate half-sister of Eleanor of Aquitaine, she is sent to a nunnery in England. She leaves behind the servant girl whose “frank and knowing body” provided Marie with endless pleasure. She is near-mad with love for her half-sister, whose presence lies heavily over her adolescent mind.
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