A medieval nunnery might not seem the most likely setting for a lesbian story. But that’s exactly what Lauren Groff has created in Matrix, a New York Times Best-Seller. The book is a fictional account of Marie de France’s life, weaving truth and myth together to create a remarkable tale.
An orphan and unwanted royal bastard, young Marie is an oddity at court. Marie’s immense height and solid build set her even further apart from the noble ladies. With no possibility of marriage, she is banished from court by the great love of her life: Eleanor of Aquitaine.
To begin with Marie resists her calling as prioress, nursing heartbreak and resenting her bleak new home. The abbey has no money; its nuns are frozen and malnourished. Yet Marie knows what it takes to manage an estate. She resolves the abbey’s desperate poverty and transforms it into a place of plenty. And as the abbey grows in status, so too does Marie. But her ambition is insatiable – and not without cost.
On a surface level, Matrix sounds like a dry book. Who really wants to read about 12th century nuns? But Matrix is impossible to put down. Groff’s style of writing is immediate, arresting. And though nuns are supposed to be spiritual, the world Groff builds is intensely physical.
From frank descriptions of Marie having sex with her maid, to her lifelong yearning for Eleanor, Marie revels in the physical. She even indulges in passionate hook-ups with the beautiful Welsh infirmatrix, justified as “an expression of the humours” akin to bloodletting.
Matrix is full of the unexpected. From a Christian perspective, it’s pure blasphemy. But from a lesbian one it is utterly delicious. Marie is a revolutionary figure because she reinterprets scripture to centre women, and papal decrees to suit her own purposes. Abstinence is not the only vow she breaks. And it is these hypocrisies that make her such a compelling character.
Matrix is written in third-person present tense, a style which brings to mind nothing so much as another iconic work of historical fiction about an ambitious renegade: Wolf Hall. Yet where Hilary Mantel had ample records and research to draw on, Groff works with rumor and dream. She leans into the radical possibilities of women’s community. “It is good, Marie thinks, so very good, this quiet life of women and work. She is amazed she ever resisted it so angrily.”
Married to a man, Groff did not at first seem a likely candidate to produce one of 2021’s biggest lesbian books. Her previous novel, Fates and Furies, is about a parasitic straight relationship in which a woman rewrites her husband’s book into a masterpiece while he takes credit for her brilliance. But her writing is subversive. And Matrix began as a form of resistance, pushing back against the relentlessness of male voices in public life.
“I live in a house full of men,” says Groff. “It’s just also awful, right? Like my two children and my husband, and there are just too many men. So I wanted to live among women.”
Through the abbey, through the character of Marie, Groff certainly achieved that dream. And Matrix has resonated with countless readers, lesbian and otherwise. Though the author herself makes no claim to the sapphic sisterhood, nuns have always held a special place in the lesbian imagination.
“My friends, when Donald Trump was elected, used to make these jokes about creating our own lesbian separatists’ island somewhere where we just walk around naked all the time,” Groff reflects. “And there are no men allowed. So this is my way of doing a lesbian separatist utopia.”
Matrix was published by Riverhead Books, and is available from all good bookstores
