Matrix

Cast out of the French court at seventeen for being too big, too poor and too plain to marry, Marie de France is sent to an English abbey where the nuns are starving. Over sixty years she turns it into a self-sufficient power: a scriptorium, an abbess’s fortune, an earthwork labyrinth to keep men out. Groff writes medieval religious life without irony and without piety, and the novel reads as an argument about what women build when they are left alone long enough to build anything.