![]() Those prophetic visions lead Marie to transform the world of the abbey and its surrounding land with feats of ingenious engineering: a labyrinth to keep the nuns safe a dam to flower their gardens through winter. ![]() Her ideas of Christianity, meanwhile, begin to mutate in curious and creative ways, her faith becoming an "angular, majestic thing" rooted in female freedom and her own technicolor visions of religious ecstasy. In this safe place, Marie can nurture her own power as well as her attraction to the women around her, imbuing the abbey with a quiet sensuality. The scion of a family of female Crusaders, she rises quickly through the nuns' ranks into a position of power, from which she molds the abbey into a kind of utopia where women find love, purpose, and protection. She'd always been clumsy fit in the court, and the coldly beautiful queen, whom Marie secretly loved, was only too happy to get rid of her.Īt first resistant to life in the poor, rundown abbey, Marie soon finds her calling. It's a far cry from her previous life as a lady-in-waiting in the glittering Westminster court of Queen Eleanor, but Marie is the awkward bastard daughter of the queen's father-in-law. Nun-to-be Marie is alone, shivering, and riding out of the forest towards her new home, a "pale and aloof" abbey overlooking a valley leached of life. ![]() ![]() Lauren Groff's Matrix (out now) opens on a bitter winter day in England, 1158. ![]()
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