Groff has outdone herself with an accomplishment as radiant as Marie’s visions.

Transcendent prose and vividly described settings bring to life historic events, from the Crusades to the papal interdict of 1208. A centrifugal lecture that both explains how the work came to be and spins you out to its inspirations like footnotes. It’s one of the best talks I’ve heard from a fiction writer. Groff fills the novel with friendships among the nuns, inspirational apparitions, and writings empowered by divine inspiration. I liked Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix so much I wanted to know more about it, and luckily, right after I finished it, a lecture she gave at Notre Dame was posted online. island of women,” where “a woman’s power exists only as far as she is allowed.” To that end, she confesses a series of 19 beatific visions that guide her in designing an impenetrable underground labyrinth as a secret passageway to the convent, building separate abbess quarters, establishing a scriptorium, and constructing a woman-made lake and dam to insure a constant water supply. With the rhythm of days and nights regulated by the canonical hours from Lauds to Prime, from Compline to bed, Marie reshapes the claustrophobic community into a “self-sufficient. She has abandoned not only familiar settings, like New York City and the upstate idyll portrayed in her first two novels, The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia, but North Americaand the 20th centuryaltogether. After Marie is banished to a poverty-stricken British abbey by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine at age 17 in 1158, she transforms from a reluctant prioress into an avid abbess. Readers introduced to Groff through Fates may find her fourth novel, Matrix (Riverhead, Sept. Groff ( Florida) fashions a boldly original narrative based on the life and legend of 12th-century poet Marie de France.

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