I expected to enjoy this book far more than I actually did. The hero, Marie de France, is someone known to have existed, but very little of her history is known. Which pretty much gave Lauren Groff carte blanche to write her story as she chose. In short, Marie, a bastard of noble birth is big and ungainly. Sent as a prioress to an impoverished and unimportant abbey, she successfully devotes her whole life to making it large, beautiful, and extraordinarily wealthy, Groff's research is impressive: she clearly understands the mediaeval religious life well. Her writing is striking, luminous. But I was entirely uninvested in the life of Marie de France and in the lives of her fellow-nuns. Dramas were quickly resolved: whole years, or even a decade or so passed in a single sentence. I didn't care for Marie a great deal - for her visions and her acquisitiveness - apparently for the glory of God. And really, it was matter of some indifference to me whether I finished the book: I did - for the quality of the prose, rather than the uninvolving narrative. ( )

Coming from just having finished The Monsters of Templeton, this was immensely enjoyable. The heartbreak, longing, vengeance, and rise of Mary were equal parts riveting and frustrating. The fantasy-esque elements of Groff's storytelling has been a pleasure to read, and the scenes in Matrix are worthy of some visual art representation. ( )

As soon as I read the review for this book in People magazine, I reserved it at my public library. I expected to read about the inspiration a for Marie's poetry, and her inner life.
It is beautifully written, and focuses on her day to day life in the abbey over 50 years.
While there doesn't seem to be a storyline, it does depict her transformation from a willful young girl to a revered, feared, and insightful leader of women. ( )

I opened this book thinking it was a historical novel. The fact that it is set in the twelfth century might have contributed to this. To me, the masters of historical fiction—Robert Graves, Gore Vidal, and Hilary Mantel, to name three of my favorites—use fiction to tap the inner feelings of historical personages without rewriting history.
What Groff offers instead is alternate history. Once I realized that, my resistance to it lessened, and I appreciated the way she used the paucity of facts to weave an imaginative tale. Mary, an illegitimate half-sister of King Henry II, was an abbess in Shaftesbury. Not much is known about her, apart from that. Whether she was the author of the Lais (narrative poems) and other works popular at court at the time is a matter of speculation. That author is known as Marie de France based on one line in a poem, where the author says Marie is her name and she is from France.
Mary of Shaftesbury is one of the many suggestions for identifying the mysterious Marie. Groff uses this to combine the two into one but goes further. Her Mary, while still young, glimpses an unclothed Eleanor of Aquitaine and is smitten. She then grows into a twenty-first-century feminist. Under her management, her abbey becomes wealthy and powerful, with features of Sappho’s finishing school (with the advantage that the girls who enter aren’t being prepared for marriage but remain in the cloister).
There is much fine, precise writing along the way, which helped hold my interest in the time it took me to recalibrate the genre. I found it harder to retain my attention for much of the second half, though; it consists of a series of incidents, more like a chronicle than a flowing story. However, I found the final chapters, recounting Mary’s last illness and death, moving. ( )

Imagining an authoritarian feminist separatist enclave, this novel is set in the 12th Century with a quite 21st Century sensibility. As a hook it drafts in the historical figure of Marie de France, of whom not much is known, but who was unlikely to have been this: illegitimate child of a king, who rises to power and transforms a poor abbey into the mightiest in England, with spies throughout all the European halls of power, cut off from her superiors and the outside world through construction of a labyrinth surrounding the abbey, banishing all men and boys from the area, acting as a priest, having affairs with fellow nuns, and having visions of the Virgin Mary and Eve kissing each other.

It's a fantasy with contemporary appeal to make up for its ahistoricism. In a further sign that Groff has at least one, if not one and a half, eyes on the current day, she includes a number of suggestions that society's failure to follow Marie's example in the following centuries led to global warming. A very odd thing to include, really!

The prose is largely pretty good; the pace of the story is breakneck (Marie is 21, now she's 32, suddenly she's 45...). It's ultimately a political novel that will appeal to a kind of politics - its listing and advertisement as one of Barack Obama's favorite books of the year makes all the sense in the world. As literature, it's fine, enjoyable, and well promoted. ( )