Groff’s trademarkworthy sentences bring vivid buoyancy to a magisterial story.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.

The gesture toward a lost theology based on Marie’s visions amounts to weak tea. Medieval mystics, unsurprisingly, write better about mysticism. Marie has visions of the Virgin Mary, 19 in all, but these passages stay flat. The cloister witnesses lust, sex, pregnancy, peril. And she knows a snake always lurks within Eden. Readers of Arcadia (2012), Groff’s brilliantly evocative hippie commune novel, will remember her gift for conjuring life without privacy. In this way, Marie forestalls the jealous priests and village men plotting against her. News spreads and the rents come in, “some grumbling but most half proud to have a woman so tough and bold and warlike and royal to answer to now.” The novel is at its best through Marie's early years of transforming the ruined, muddy convent, bit by bit, into a thriving estate, with a prosperous new scriptorium, brimming fields, and spilling flocks, protected by a forest labyrinth and spies abroad. After a long sulk, Marie rouses herself to examine the abbey’s disastrous ledgers, mount her warhorse, and gallop forth to turn out the family most egregiously squatting on convent land. The sisters hang the traveler’s clothes in the communal privy, where “the ammonia of the piss kills the beasties”-the lice. But in the first chapter, the queen rids the court of an ungainly, rustic Marie by installing her in a remote English convent, home to 20 starving nuns.

A matrix, which comes from the Latin for mother, builds implacably between Eleanor and Marie.

Groff gives her a fraught, lifelong, sexually charged tie to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.” The inspiration is a historical figure, Marie de France, considered the first woman to write poetry in French. Set in early medieval Europe, this book paints a rousing portrait of an abbess seizing and holding power.Īfter the spicy, structurally innovative Fates and Furies (2015), Groff spins back 850 years to a girl on a horse: “She rides out of the forest alone.

Visions by Lauren Klever