Furious, lonely, sensually hungry, Marie begins to apply herself to improving the lot of her new community. Cecily, her maid and lover at court, has refused to live among nuns who pray so much they are “up and down all day, like marmots”. Anywhere in England is bad enough, but “even for England this is pathetic”. The future does not look auspicious for Groff’s Marie when she arrives among half-starving sisters in a “stinking mud-befouled corner of Angleterre”. Groff seizes on the few hints, rides cantering into the huge gaps, and makes up a life for Marie – a long and full life as a visionary leader, queer lover, writer and mother, or “matrix”, to a thriving community of women. Her poetry gives no indication that she belonged to a religious house, though she has been tentatively identified with Mary, abbess of Shaftesbury.

She was probably writing in England, though she came from northern France. Almost nothing is known about this pioneering poet except what she tells us, with a self-assertion unusual for her time and gender, in her collection of Breton lais, or romances, and translations of Aesop’s fables. Matrix is a very free imagining of the life of Marie de France. This is a highly distinctive novel of great vigour and boldness Appalled by the prospect ahead, agonised by leaving her devoutly loved Eleanor behind, she goes to her doom. She has been ejected from court by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine: “thrown to the dogs”, or at least sent off to be prioress at a remote royal abbey. We meet protagonist Marie emerging from a forest on horseback, like a knight errant at the start of a medieval romance – except not, because she’s a young woman, it’s a drizzling March day and “the world bears the weariness of late Lent”. From mystical visions that may or may not be divine, to the earthy business of abbey pigs, diseases and account books, Groff does it all with purpose and panache. The result is a highly distinctive novel of great vigour and boldness.

Now, in an appealingly unpredictable move, Lauren Groff has turned her attentions to 12th-century English nuns. T he author of Fates and Furieshas been much acclaimed, especially in the US, for sharp yet exuberant writing about contemporary marriage, parenthood, sexual rivalry and the threats that lie in the midst of daily routines.

Visions by Lauren Klever