Soon, all men are expelled from the lands around the convent and a great labyrinth is built to protect it from attack. “There is no mention of female sodomy in any of the books and the great angry moralists would have mentioned it if it were a sin,” Marie tells herself. Like Madeline Miller in The Song of Achilles, Groff finds in the germs of the historical record whispers of hidden sexuality. Soon, she is prioress, then abbess, and the formerly unproductive lands and delinquent tenants start making the abbey a place of great wealth. Marie first kicks against the strictures of the convent, then decides to seize power herself. The nuns’ faces “are skulls skinned of flesh in the dark dortoir”. Marie finds the abbey in a terrible state. She is near-mad with love for her half-sister, whose presence lies heavily over her adolescent mind. She leaves behind the servant girl whose “frank and knowing body” provided Marie with endless pleasure. 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.

Groff has read these mystical poems and what limited historical records we have and has fashioned a life for Marie. 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’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. 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.

More recently, there’s been Christopher Wilson’s Hurdy Gurdy, James Meek’s To Calais, in Ordinary Timeand, in a slightly skewed vision, Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep. 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. M onasteries and convents make excellent crucibles: closed worlds in which the events of a novel are heightened, their tensions felt more keenly.

Matrix lauren groff review