About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..
She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.
It is 1158 and the world bears the weariness of late Lent. Soon it will be Easter, which arrives early this year. In the fields, the seeds uncurl in the dark cold soil, ready to punch into the freer air. 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. Most of the year this place is emerald and sapphire, bursting under dampness, thick with sheep and chaffinches and newts, delicate mushrooms poking from the rich soil, but now in late winter, all is gray and full of shadows.
Her old warhorse glumly plods along and a merlin shivers in its wicker mew on the box mounted behind her.
The wind hushes. The trees cease stirring.
Marie feels that the whole countryside is watching her move through it.
She is tall, a giantess of a maiden, and her elbows and knees stick out, ungainly; the fine rain gathers until it runs in rivulets down her sealskin cloak and darkens her green headcloths to black. Her stark Angevin face holds no beauty, only canniness and passion yet unchecked. It is wet with rain, not tears. She has yet to cry for having been thrown to the dogs.
Two days earlier, 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 chapelet and perfume strong enough to knock a soul to the ground. Her intention was always to disarm by stunning. Her ladies stood behind her, hiding their smiles. Among these traitors was Marie's own half sister, a bastardess sibling of the crown just like Marie, the sum of errant paternal lusts; but this simpering creature, having understood the uses of popularity in the court, had blanched and run from Marie's attempts to befriend her. She would one day become a princess of the Welsh.
Marie curtsied clumsily, and Eleanor glided into the room, her nostrils twitching.
The queen said that she had news, oh what delightful news, what relief, she had just now received the papal dispensation, the poor horse had exploded its heart it had galloped so fast to bring it here this morning. That, due to her, the queen's, own efforts over these months, this poor illegitimate Marie from nowhere in Le Maine had at last been made prioress of a royal abbey. Wasn't that wonderful. Now at last they knew what to do with this odd half sister to the crown. Now they had a use for Marie at last.
The queen's heavily lined eyes rested upon Marie for a moment, then moved to the high window that overlooked the gardens, where the shutters were thrust open so Marie could stand on her toes and watch people walking outside.
When Marie's mouth could move, she said, thickly, that she was grateful to the queen for the radiance of her attention, but oh no she could not be a nun, she was unworthy, and besides she had no godly vocation whatsoever in any way, at all.
And it was true, the religion she was raised in had always seemed vaguely foolish to her, if rich with mystery and ceremony, for why should babies be born into sin, why should she pray to the invisible forces, why would god be a trinity, why should she, who felt her greatness hot in her blood, be considered lesser because the first woman was molded from a rib and ate a fruit and thus lost lazy Eden? It was senseless. Her faith had twisted very early in her childhood; it would slowly grow ever more bent into its geometry until it was its own angular, majestic thing.
But at seventeen, in this spare chamber at the court in Westminster, she could be no equal to the elegant and story-loving queen, who, though small in body, absorbed all light, all thought from Marie's head, all breath from her lungs.
Eleanor simply looked at Marie and Marie had not felt so small since she'd last seen Le Maine, her six amazon aunts gone to death or marriage or convent, and her mother taking Marie's hand and pressing it to the egg growing between her breasts, smiling hugely but with tears in her eyes, saying oh darling forgive me, I'm dying; and that great strong body so swiftly reduced to skeleton, acrid breath, then no breath at all, and Marie pressing all her vitality down into the ribs, all her prayers, but the heart stayed still. Twelve-year-old Marie's bitter anguish at the high windy burial ground; and afterward the two years of loneliness because her mother insisted her death remain a secret, for the family wolves would strip the estate from Marie as soon as they heard, she being just a maiden bastardess formed of rape, not entitled to a thing; two lonely years of Marie wringing what coin she could from the land. Then the hoofs on the far bridge and the flight up to Rouen then across the channel to her legitimate half-sibling's royal court at Westminster, where Marie appalled everyone with her ravenousness, her rawness, her gauche bigboned body; where most privileges accorded her royal blood she lost due to the faults of her person.
Eleanor laughed at Marie's refusal of her favor, mocked her. But but but. Did Marie truly think she would one day be married off? 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? What spouse would accept Marie, a creature absent of beauty or even the smallest of feminine arts? No, no, this was better, it had long ago been decided, back in the autumn, and her entire family agreed. Marie knew how to run a large estate, she could write in four languages, she could keep account books, she did all this so admirably after her mother died, even though still a tender little maiden, and what's more she did it so well that she fooled the whole world into thinking for two years that she was her own dead mother. Which was, of course, to say that the abbey where Marie would be installed as prioress was so poor they happened just now to be starving to death, alas. They had fallen out of Eleanor's pleasure some years earlier and had suffered grave poverty ever since. Also, there was a sickness still raging there. And the queen could not have the nuns of a royal abbey both starve to death and die of a horrible coughing sickness! That would reflect poorly on her.
Her cold eyes rimmed in black bored into Marie; Marie had no courage to look back. The queen told Marie to have faith, in time Marie would make a rather good nun. Anyone with eyes could see she had always been meant for holy virginity.
With this, the ladies were released into laughter. Marie wanted to squeeze their twittering beaks shut. Eleanor extended her hand, encrusted with rings. She said gently that Marie must learn to love her new life, that she must learn to make the best of it, for this was the desire of both god and the queen. She would go tomorrow with a royal escort and Eleanor's own blessing.
Marie, not knowing what else to do, took the small white hand in her great rough ones and kissed it. Such things wrestled inside the girl. She wanted to take the soft flesh in her mouth and bite it to blood; she wanted to strike the hand from the wrist with her dagger and guard it as a relic in her bodice for eternity.
The queen swept out again. Marie went dizzy to the bed, to her servant Cecily, who kissed her head, her lips, her neck. Cecily was as blunt and loyal as a dog. She seethed and murmured calumny, saying that the queen was a dirty licentious southerner, that she had only been made queen the first time because of a single raging French sow, the second time because of a choking plate of English eels, that anyone could bed her for the price of a song, indeed just sing a romance and she'll lift her skirts, if none of her children looked alike it was for a reason, that the devil sent malice into that royal head, oh Cecily had heard dark stories indeed.
And at last Marie roused from her shock and told the servant to hush, for the queen's perfume lingered, a watchful ghost, in the room.
Then Cecily began to weep her fresh face ugly, all snot and blotches, and delivered the second blow. She told Marie that she, herself, would not be going with Marie to the abbey. That though she loved her mistress, she was too young and had far too much life to be lived to be buried alive forever with a bunch of dead-eyed nuns. Cecily was made for marriage, look at these hips, they could bear ten hearty babes, plus her knees were weak and she was not made for kneeling all day long in prayer. Up and down, up and down all day, like marmots. Yes, tomorrow morning, Cecily and Marie would be separated.
And Marie-who had been born into this friendship with Cecily, the daughter of the cook on her family's estate in Le Maine, this rough person who had up until this moment been everything to Marie, mistress and sister and servant and pleasure and single loving soul in all of Angleterre-at last understood that she would be sent into her living death alone.
The servant wept, saying over and over, oh sweet Marie, oh her heart cleaved.
To which Marie, pulling herself away, said it must be the most unloyal form of cleaving.
Then she rose and stared out the open window at the garden in its cloak of fog, feeling the sun go down inside her. She put in her mouth the apricot pits from the fruit she'd stolen in the summer from the queen's private trees, because in the autumn and winter she liked to suck the bitterness out of them. Over the landscape within her the chill of dusk blew, and all in shadow went grotesque with strangeness.
And she felt ebbing out of her the dazzling love that had filled those two years in Eleanor's court in Angleterre, that brushed even the difficulties and the loneliness in Marie with a fine and gleaming light. Her first day in the court in Westminster, she still had the salt of crossing on her lips when she sat at the supper, overwhelmed; and at last the lutes and hautboys played and in the door was Eleanor, swollen with the end of pregnancy, belly and breasts, her right cheek enflamed, for a tooth had been pulled that day, and she moved with such tiny footsteps she seemed to glide like a swan, and she wore that same face that Marie had seen and loved in her dreams from the time she was small. The light in the room drew to a tiny pinprick illuminating only Eleanor. This was the moment that Marie was lost. That night she returned to Cecily in the bed already snoring, and woke the girl by moving urgently against her hand. Marie would have hunted for a grail, hidden her sex and ridden off to war and killed without sorrow, she would have borne cruelty with a bowed head, would have lived patiently among the lepers, she would have done any of these things if Eleanor had asked them of her. For it was out of Eleanor all good things flowed: music and laughter and courtly love; out of her beauty, came beauty, for everyone knew beauty to be the external sign of god's favor.
Even now, after being thrown away like rubbish, Marie considers, ashamed, riding toward the glum damp abbey, that she still would.
For she is stunned at the poverty of this place in the drizzle and cold, the buildings clenched pale atop the hill. It is true that all England is poorer than France, the cities smaller and darker and fuller of filth, the people scrawny and chilblained, but even for England this is pathetic, the derelict outbuildings, the falling fences, the garden smoldering with burn piles of last year's weeds. Her horse plods along. The merlin cheeps, unhappy, plucking down from under its wings. Marie slowly nears the churchyard. All she had known of the place was that it had been founded by a royal sister made saint centuries before, whose fingerbone in death can now cure a boil; and that in the times of the Danish invasions the place had been sacked and looted, nuns raped, that in the marshlands all around there were still sometimes found skeletons with runes that had been tattooed so deep their tracery showed on the bones of the skulls. And when, in the inn where she had rested for the night, Marie had tentatively said the name of the abbey to the girl who had brought up her dinner, the girl had blanched and said something in English swift and incomprehensible, but the tone of her voice made it clear the people of the countryside found the abbey a dark and strange and piteous place, a place to inspire fear. And so Marie had dismissed her escort in town to arrive at this place of her living death alone.
Now under the yew she counts fourteen fresh black graves, shining under the drizzle. Later she will learn that buried there are the bodies of a dozen nuns and two child oblates taken only weeks before by a strange disease that made the flesh of the sufferers blue as they drowned in their own lungs; that some of the nuns are still sick, wheezing and giving rattling coughs in the night.
There is cut holly on the raw graves and the red berries are the only things that glow faintly in the mizzle, in the world at large, which has no more color in it.
All will be gray, she thinks, the rest of her life gray. Gray soul, gray sky, gray earth of March, grayish whitish abbey. Poor gray Marie. In the tall doors of the abbey now, two small gray nuns have emerged in their woolen habits.
As she nears, Marie sees that one of the nuns has a great soft ageless face, billowy, with eyes gone white with the clouds in them. Marie has been told little of the abbey, but enough to know this woman is the abbess Emme, to whom an internal music has been given as solace for her blindness. She has heard the abbess is terrifically mad, if in a kindly way.
Lauren groff.
Lauren Groff is the author of five novels: THE VASTER WILDS, forthcoming in September 2023, and two National Book Award Finalists, MATRIX and FATES AND FURIES; as well as ARCADIA and THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON. Her story collections include FLORIDA, winner of The Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and DELICATE EDIBLE BIRDS. She has been twice been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, as well as for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Orange Prize for New Writers. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and was named one of Granta's 2017 Best Young American Novelists. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's, in seven Best American Short Stories anthologies. Her books have been published in over 30 languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Customers find the writing quality great, easy to read, and fluid. They describe the book as an interesting, well-thought-out read with a beautiful, vibrant, and well-developed portrait. Opinions are mixed on the story quality, with some finding it well-researched and beautifully constructed, while others say it's not engrossing. Readers also disagree on the character development, with those who find them compelling and vivid, while those who say they're one-dimensional.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the writing quality of the book excellent. They say the author is clearly gifted, evoking time, place, and the inner life of the powerful medieval woman. Readers also mention the book is easy to read, lyrical, and surprisingly fluid.
"...Groff shows us even when she’s not telling. She’s such a visual and balanced writer , all the parts fit...." Read more
"...Loren Groff's usual command of the natural world and beguiling sentences . I recommend." Read more
"...The novel is well-written and gives the reader the sense of the life of a nun in difficult times. Still, the read may not be for everyone...." Read more
"... Easy to read , but hard to bear." Read more
Customers find the book interesting, well-thought-out, and enjoyable. They say it's a real page-turner that pulls the reader along.
"...If you are looking for a well-thought out book that will make you think, this is a book for you." Read more
"... This book is a true masterpiece . While the true history of Marie de France is historically a mystery, this conjecture is perfectly reasonable...." Read more
" Loved this book - the story , the protagonist Marie, the place, the nuns, and the lyricism. Read it twice, and highly recommend" Read more
"Lauren Groff is an amazing author . I read to feel something, and to be absorbed in the art of the author’s word...." Read more
Customers find the book's visual style beautiful, vibrant, and fascinating. They also appreciate the urbane wit and rustic setting. Readers mention the book is creatively conceived and told.
"...They show courage and possess a raw elegance . Marie, made prioress at a shabby abbey at the age of 17, year 1158. Why not be married off? “..." Read more
"... Much historical color , interesting characters...." Read more
"I was riveted by this delicious, vibrant , heart-wrenching story of a woman who is as invincible as possible but who still must suffer, age and die...." Read more
"...The story involving nuns and their woman leader was rich , complex, and compelling." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the story quality. Some mention it's well-researched, beautifully constructed, and epic. Others say the premise is fantastic, but the book isn't engrossing and hard to follow at times.
"...It was carefully researched and provides a look at what monastic life might have been like in the twelfth century. I enjoyed reading the book...." Read more
"...The plot drags a great deal towards the middle, making this very short novel feel immensely denser than its 260 pages...." Read more
"...Matrix is epic adventure and drama , a little Coven-ish (Groff has a talent for the goblin-esque and great outdoors), and urbane wit in a rustic,..." Read more
"...This is the engaging story of her struggles to build a genuine beloved community whose land can support the 20+ nuns...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the character development. Some mention the character is compelling, the relationship dynamics and characters come alive vividly, and the prose is beautiful. Others say the characters are not very compelling, and they seem wooden.
"... Relationship dynamics and characters come alive vividly , especially Marie, an unconventional woman by any standard...." Read more
"...It turns out that this fictional character is a committed lesbian . There is no historical basis for attributing this predeliction to Marie de France...." Read more
"...Marie matures in the abbey, because she has mettle and noble blood, oozes charisma , and alights a little heretic inside her spirited soul...." Read more
"...I liked all aspects of the book: the character development , the growth of the abbey, and the focus on women in important positions..." Read more
Customers find the execution quality of the book weak, terrible, and not worth the effort. They say the idea is inspiring, but the execution is marred and hard to follow at times.
"...This novel isn't engrossing in the least and it's hard to follow at times simply because nothing particularly interesting or relevant seems to be..." Read more
"...The premise was enticing, but execution failed . I made myself finish the book but was unsatisfied." Read more
"...absolutely no character development the whole thing felt dull and tedious , which is surprising when you consider the potential of the story...." Read more
"...Very boring and never got better . Wish I hadn't fallen for the reviews and wasted my money on this book." Read more
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Aug. 31, 2021. MATRIX. By Lauren Groff. Maybe it's the return of children's crusades, Greta Thunberg's for the environment, David Hogg's against gun violence. Or the unrelenting death ...
Review: 'Matrix,' By Lauren Groff Lauren Groff digs deep into the past with Matrix, based on the real-life writer Marie de France. Little is known about the real Marie, but Groff gives us an ...
Lauren Groff's Matrix, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Vox Book Club's October pick, embodies that fantasy once again. It takes the scraps we know of the real-life poet Marie de ...
Matrix by Lauren Groff. reviewed by Bailey Sincox. Lauren Groff's 2015 novel Fates and Furies—a finalist for the National Book Award, among other honors—is ostensibly about a marriage, but on closer inspection it's about something thornier, unsettling in its very banality: the difficulty of knowing another person at all.Like Fates and Furies, Groff's new novel, Matrix, is full of ...
In Lauren Groff's hands, the tale of a medieval nunnery is must-read fiction. Review by Ron Charles. August 31, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. EDT. If " Matrix " were written by anyone else, it would be ...
The idea behind Matrix —the life story of a radical 12th-century nun—stemmed from Groff's desire for a respite. In the two years after Fates and Furies came out, she found herself unable to ...
On the Shelf. Matrix. By Lauren Groff Riverhead: 272 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
About Matrix. AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2022 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2021 ... " - New York Times Book Review "Far more than a treat for history buffs. . . . [Groff] writes a creative, intelligent work that will last."
MATRIX. Groff's trademarkworthy sentences bring vivid buoyancy to a magisterial story. Set in early medieval Europe, this book paints a rousing portrait of an abbess seizing and holding power. After the spicy, structurally innovative Fates and Furies (2015), Groff spins back 850 years to a girl on a horse: "She rides out of the forest alone.
Matrix received very favorable reviews, with a cumulative "Rave" rating at the review aggregator website Book Marks, based on 31 book reviews from mainstream literary critics. [5] The novel debuted at number eleven on The New York Times fiction best-seller list for the week ending September 11, 2021. [6] Publishers Weekly, in its starred review, praised Groff's "boldly original narrative" and ...
An epic story of ambitious women set in a 12th century abbey. The title of Lauren Groff's fourth novel, after National Book Award finalist Fates and Furies (2015), refers to the late Middle English definition of the word "matrix," meaning "womb," born from the Latin root "matri," meaning mother. Its significance is cemented through a scene depicting protagonist Marie (based on 12th century ...
Matrix: A Novel. Paperback - September 6, 2022. Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, The Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Vulture, Marie Claire, Vox, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more! "A relentless exhibition of Groff's freakish talent. In just over 250 pages, she gives ...
Lauren Groff's new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world. One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies. One. 1. She rides out of the forest alone.
Reviewed: Matrix. by Lauren Groff. Riverhead, 260 pp., $28.00. It is hard to pin down Marie de France, though many have tried. The best-known woman poet of the Middle Ages is a chimera, pieced together centuries after she lived from stray clues in the poems that are attributed to her. In the story most often told about her today, Marie was a ...
New York Times Bestseller. IndieBound Bestseller. National Book Award Finalist. Set in early medieval Europe, this book paints a rousing portrait of an abbess seizing and holding power. After the spicy, structurally innovative Fates and Furies (2015), Groff spins back 850 years to a girl on a horse: "She rides out of the forest alone.
I loved Groff's 2015 novel Fates and Furies, but Matrix is a very different creature, and in my opinion, a superior one - a dazzling, primeval story of love, sex, power, community and care. Matrix glows with the fierce fire of sisterhood, like the one Marie's 'daughters' see burning inside her.
" - New York Times Book Review "Far more than a treat for history buffs. . . . [Groff] writes a creative, intelligent work that will last." ... Lauren Groff is the author of five novels: THE VASTER WILDS, forthcoming in September 2023, and two National Book Award Finalists, MATRIX and FATES AND FURIES; as well as ARCADIA and THE MONSTERS ...
The American writer Lauren Groff is best known for Fates and Furies (2015), a novel charting simmering power relations and resentments in a complex.
-Washington Independent Review of Books "A mesmerizing study of faith, ... Lauren Groff is the author of five novels: THE VASTER WILDS, forthcoming in September 2023, and two National Book Award Finalists, MATRIX and FATES AND FURIES; as well as ARCADIA and THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON. Her story collections include FLORIDA, winner of The Story ...