She sets out to reshape the abbey and its environs into an ideal community where its inhabitants can fulfill their collective potential. The abbey’s relative marginality, paired with the vital role of its estate in sustaining the local economy, presents an opportunity for Marie to withdraw from her diocesan superiors and craft a guarded, defiant authority. But as she ascends the abbey’s ranks, she soon recognizes a pocket of freedom within its walls.
MARIE, THE 12TH-CENTURY nun at the center of Lauren Groff’s latest novel, Matrix, has given herself a mandate: “She will make something useful, a lake, out of something useless, this bog of mud and stink, this swamp.” An illegitimate and unsuitable daughter of the crown, Marie has been banished from Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court to manage an ailing abbey where “all is gray and full of shadows.” Harboring little reverence for the church, she knows that abbeys are often used as receptacles for women unfit for - or threatening to - the social order.
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