▪️Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021

matrix is the imagined life of Marie de France - very little is known about her besides she was a 12th-century poet and likely an abbess at a convent.

In the novel the majority of the plot is fiction. Marie is considered too ~coarse~ for marriage, too ugly, not the refined characteristics of a lady in waiting. She is exiled to a convent on a dilapidated island - nuns are dying left and right from starvation and disease because they lack adequate funding or resources.

Marie at first simply wants to leave. Although soon the reader sees Marie evolve into a powerful leader. She uses the traits that others looked down on for the good of the abbey. She turns it into a flourishing convent, she becomes a pillar for all her sisters. Sexuality and sexual desire are undercurrents in the story which make Marie more personable. Even with all of her accomplishments she has basic human desires that have long gone unmet.

The entire novel is centered around women, it’s a feminist perspective which may be hard to imagine for a book being set in medieval times but Groff puts the reader in these women living in a man’s world and has us rooting for the women to be cutthroat to be allowed basic human rights.

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