Matrix
Lauren Groff's Matrix, published in 2021, is a luminous, formally daring historical novel about a real medieval poet whose biography is almost entirely lost. Marie de France, plain, oversized, and a possible bastard half sister to King Henry II, is exiled at seventeen by her cousin Eleanor of Aquitaine to a desperately poor English nunnery, where most of the sisters are starving on a diet of moldy bread. Marie arrives consumed with grief, but the discipline of the rule and the strange freedom of an all female society slowly turn her into something else: a brilliant administrator, then a builder, and finally a visionary who orders a labyrinth and a hidden women's only chapel raised around the abbey to protect her sisters from the men outside. Groff writes in incantatory, present tense prose that compresses fifty years of medieval life into a tight, fierce four hundred page novel about female ambition, queer longing, and what it means to build a sanctuary.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Matrix
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Cast out of the French court at seventeen, Marie de France is sent to run a poor English abbey. Her visions, her ambition, and her love for her nuns slowly turn the place into a fortress of women on the edge of the world.
The most commonly searched Matrix is the 2021 novel by Lauren Groff, about a 12th-century French nun who becomes prioress of an English abbey. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction.
No. Matrix is a standalone, separate from Fates and Furies and Lauren Groff's other novels. Each of her books is independent.
Matrix is 248 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Matrix takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
Matrix is a standalone novel by Sophia Stewart, not part of a series.
Matrix is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.