StoryGraph Saturday is a weekly thing where I randomly choose a book from my To Read pile on StoryGraph and show it off to both remind myself that it’s there and to show it to you, Dear Reader, in case you might find it interesting, too.

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Matrix
by Lauren Groff
Historical Fiction
272 pages
Expected publication: September 7, 2021

From The StoryGraph:

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

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I haven’t read anything by Lauren Groff before, but I’ve heard great things about her work, so the fact that she has a historical fiction novel coming out soon makes me want to seek out this book. Add in the fact that 1) it’s about a Medieval female poet (about whom we know fairly little), and 2) Groff is taking a look at the intellectual lives of Medieval nuns, who are generally regarded as oppressed women forced into a life starved of everything interesting, in spite of the documentation we have of many nuns being highly intellectual people who contributed quite a lot to society.

Anyway. I am looking forward to this historical novel by an acclaimed author about a female poet who wrote things people are still reading hundreds of years later.