These poems are the only surviving testament of the real Marie de France, around which Groff builds her tale of a lovelorn poet who becomes animated with ambition, growing into a capable and savvy prioress devoted to building a thriving feminist utopia around herself and her sisters.
Marie laments her exile and composes a series of poems to Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom Groff imagines to be Marie’s unrequited love. When Marie arrives at the convent, it’s in desolate condition, populated by a few starving women who are unable to protect themselves from famine or harsh English winters. She is banished from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court and exiled to a convent in the English countryside to live out the rest of her days. In Groff’s novel, Marie is an 17 year old orphan, deemed unfit for marriage because she is a “great clumsy lunk” with a “giant bony body”. Lauren Groff brings readers back to the Middle Ages in her new novel, Matrix, a fiction loosely created around the life of the twelfth century nun and poet, Marie de France.
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