She is homesick for the court of Eleanor, which she remembers as a vibrant and romantic place, and she also misses Eleanor herself. As an outsider who has been installed as prioress, Marie is viewed with suspicion and resentment by many of the nuns. Its lands are poorly managed, and many of the nuns at the abbey are sickly from pneumonia and lack of food. It is a forbidding place to her at first. The novel opens with Marie’s arrival at the abbey. Eleanor then decides to install her as a prioress at an impoverished abbey in a remote part of England. Shortly after her mother’s death from cancer, she is sent to live at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, to whom she is related through her father. In the novel, she comes from a family of unconventional noblewomen and is the illegitimate daughter of a Plantagenet, Europe’s richest family at that time and the rulers of England from the 12th to the 15th centuries. The novel takes Marie de France as its central character and reimagines her life and temperament.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was a 12th-century duchess who went on to become Queen of France and England. Marie de France was a 12th-century poet and noblewoman about whom little is known. Matrix is a historical novel that takes place during the 12th and 13th centuries and features two real historical characters, Marie de France and Eleanor of Aquitaine. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award three times and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also published one dozen short stories in such publications as The New Yorker and Tin House, in addition to numerous introductions and forewords to other authors’ work. Her work is frequently anthologized and has appeared in several volumes of The Best American Short Stories. Groff has published six novels and short story collections, including the best sellers Arcadia, Fates and Furies, and The Monsters of Templeton. Matrix is a National Book Award-nominated novel by Lauren Groff, published by Riverhead Books in 2021.

The matrix lauren groff