Matrix

Content Warning: This novel and review contain references to gender discrimination, anti-gay bias, religious discrimination, sexual content, and death.

Matrix is author Lauren Groff’s first work of historical fiction (she went on to publish The Vaster Wilds, another work of historical fiction, in 2023). While the setting of 12th-century England will be unfamiliar to most readers, Groff uses it as a backdrop to depict queer desire, struggles for agency, and questions of leadership. The novel reflects Groff’s interest in themes of gender, power, and moral ambiguity: In this work, she depicts these themes within a world comprised entirely of women. By focusing on one of only a few known medieval woman authors (Marie de France), Groff also explores timeless ideas of creativity and inspiration and pays indirect homage to a literary forebearer. 

The novel’s protagonist, Marie, comes from an aristocratic French family but makes her way to the English royal court in the 1100s, where she falls in love with the beautiful queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her feelings make Eleanor’s subsequent choice to make Marie the prioress of an abbey without even consulting her all the more devastating for Marie. When she arrives, the abbey is poverty-stricken, and the community of nuns is struggling to survive. Marie initially chafes at the isolation and rigid rules governing life as a nun. She also pines for Eleanor and clings to hopes of being allowed to leave the abbey. Eventually, Marie accepts that her fate is to live in the abbey forever—a realization that coincides with her growing affection and sense of responsibility for the other nuns. She is eventually promoted to the role of abbess, which comes with both significant power and responsibility. Marie commits to a goal of making the abbey more prosperous and becomes a determined, stern, and ferociously protective leader who institutes many reforms and projects.

Decades pass, and the abbey becomes wealthy and influential; its status and reputation render Marie powerful within the local community. Marie begins to have visions, which she writes down, and she increasingly develops her own unorthodox version of Christian faith, which focuses on seeing the divine as feminine. Marie develops emotional bonds with some of the nuns and has occasional experiences of queer sexuality, eventually determining that desire and pleasure are necessary and not sinful. As an authority figure, she must also sometimes make difficult decisions, and Marie shows that she is willing to sacrifice individuals when working toward her larger goal of keeping the abbey secure and prosperous. The novel follows Marie until her peaceful death at an elderly age, at which point the abbey—and its legacy—passes on to a new abbess.

Marie’s actions and inner world form the core of the novel, which follows her development over decades of her life. Marie is only 17 when she enters the convent, and she dies in her seventies. The time span and the unexpected intimacy of the third-person omniscient narrative mean that readers have the opportunity to observe Marie in a wide variety of situations. She gradually comes into her own, accepting that some aspects of her identity (such as her unusual height and equally outsized personality) can be sources of power rather than shame. Part of the novel’s freshness comes from the fact that Groff wisely eschews the trope of a woman achieving empowerment through traditionally male channels such as political office or military prowess: Marie becomes powerful because she accepts an existing role that is reserved for women and leverages it to achieve significant wealth and influence. Marie does not choose to spend her life in a convent, nor is she temperamentally well suited to this lifestyle, but she achieves agency through her acceptance of her fate and her decision to make the best of the life she has.

On the one hand, the isolation of Marie’s life means that there is relatively little plot action and that the incidents that do occur are fairly limited in scope (such as a nun falling ill or getting injured). This slow pacing is not without significance, echoing what Marie initially perceives as the unbearable tedium of monastic life, but it may frustrate some readers. On the other hand, the novel’s leisurely narrative allows Groff to linger on apparently minor incidents, imbuing them with meaning through prose that is itself both spare and lyrical; at one point, a white doe “look[s] her entire self into [Marie]” (34). The pacing also affords ample space to flesh out the complex psychological and interpersonal dynamics within an isolated community: The nuns have rivalries, desires, affections, and challenges.

Moreover, Marie’s high-ranking status means that she is connected to wider political events such as wars, dynastic struggles, and religious dictates. Marie often acts as the intermediary, at times literally deciding what information the women under her dictates will have access to; at one point, she shields them from the knowledge that religious sacraments are no longer being practiced and begins administering sacraments herself. Though the novel does not shy away from the ethical ambiguities of this selective sharing of information, it is somewhat less cognizant of the ramifications for readers, who may lack the historical knowledge to contextualize Marie’s actions fully.

Marie herself is not a universally sympathetic character: She is sometimes selfish or hypocritical, and she toes an interesting line between upholding some beliefs that have become central to contemporary feminism while also engaging in some of the repressive and misogynistic practices of her era. Because of the power she wields within the abbey, Marie’s life is a study in leadership, prompting readers to reflect on whether her morally grayer decisions are justified if they uphold laudable goals.