![]() ![]() In Marie’s world, both victors and vanquished share a common Catholic culture, but their native languages diverge vastly. And she’s resentful of what she sees as her abrupt banishment from the court, the nexus of meaningful life in the realm. ![]() Disdained for the circumstances of her creation, Marie is also notoriously tall and gangly and anything but well favored when it comes to facial beauty. Her noble mother is Queen Eleanor’s sister. The story is set in an impoverished English nunnery recently coming under Norman sway, where 17-year-old Marie is sent by the queen to become an abbess-in-waiting. Matrix narrates the inner life of a fictionally reconstituted “Marie de France.” Scholars disagree on precisely who the actual Marie was, but she makes occasional appearances in the historical record as a poet, fabulist, and religious visionary usually associated with the Anglo-Norman monarch Henry II and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. In her new novel, Lauren Groff brilliantly recreates 12th-century England, a landscape of two cultures owing to its conquest a century earlier by the Norman French. ![]()
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