The New York Review of Books - USA (2021-12-16)

December 16, 2021 41

survival, even when it consists mainly

of paperwork. Groff vividly captures

the maneuvers a woman in the twelfth

century, or any century, would have

needed to make in order to prevail in

an unfriendly world. Marie writes let-

ters cultivating patrons and holding off

meddling churchmen, sends gifts to

families who will make good allies, and

pays to have songs about her abbey’s

glory performed in the cities of Europe.

Less convincing is Marie’s reorgani-

zation of the abbey’s work, to which

she brings the energy of a management

consultant wielding a fresh Ivy League

degree. The nuns she finds are starving,

apparently ignorant of gardening, fish-

ing, or gathering food until seventeen-

year-old Marie arrives to tell them how

to do it. To instill humility, each nun

had been assigned precisely the tasks

she found most painful, leaving the

community in a state of continual tor-

ment. Marie decides there will be “no

more milking done by weeping terri-

fied Sister Lucy, whose sister was killed

by a heifer kick to the head,” along with

other reforms. Why does Marie know

so much at her age, while the other

nuns are cartoonishly incapable of sur-

viving on their own?

Some explanation is to be found in

Marie’s backstory: she ran the family

estate for two years on the sly after

her mother’s death. More to the point,

however, the abbey has to be abject so

that it can be rescued by Marie, who

comes to it as an evangelist for the rev-

olutionary potential of labor:

So many hours have been forever

lost through feebleness and reluc-

tance. There is nothing wrong, she

thinks, in taking pride in the work

of one’s body. She has never been

convinced by any argument for

abasement. Surely god, who has

done all good work, wants work to

be done well.

Here is why Eden was “lazy.” The col-

orless, insipid, and above all inefficient

monastery Marie finds is a stereotyped

version of the medieval past. At one

point she muses that the practice of

reading aloud means that “there is no

private dialogue to challenge the inter-

nal voice and press it forward,” hence

“few of her nuns have the capacity to

think for themselves.” Marie is the

fresh wind of modernity, bringing with

her genius, individuality, and industry.

Perhaps it makes sense, then, that the

rest of the novel consists of an uninter-

rupted litany of success stories. Despite

her early lack of faith, Marie is given a

“great, ground-trembling” vision of the

Virgin Mar y holding a rose that blooms

and disintegrates in her hand:

The petals circle in the wind and

the soft petals each tear down the

great trees of the forest in a pat-

tern. And Marie can feel the pat-

tern in her fingers as though she is

tracing it with her hand, and knows

it to be a labyrinth; and at the heart

of the labyrinth she sees a yellow

broom flower holding upon its

slender stalk a shining full moon.

Marie understands this as an instruc-

tion to build a labyrinth in the forest

around the monastery to keep her ten-

der nuns safe from the predatory influ-

ence of men. The nuns do much of the

construction work themselves, growing

stronger as they do so; in the evenings,

“they return with callused hands, sun-

burnt cheeks, a swagger of exhaustion

and pride in their legs.” Even the young

novices apply themselves, and every-

one is happier and healthier than ever

before now that they have discovered

the joyful potential of exercise. An-

other message from above, and Marie

builds an abbess house, then a water

reservoir. Finally, she breaks the ulti-

mate stained-glass ceiling: she takes

confession and gives her nuns Holy

Communion, eliminating the need for

male priests altogether.

Groff seems unwilling at any point

to let her protagonist suffer defeat. Ma-

rie’s namesake, the mysterious author

of those haunting Breton lais, knew

that the most resonant tales come from

loss. Marie, however, has little time

for melancholy: she is too busy build-

ing up her credentials as a heroine, not

for the twelfth but for the twenty-first

century. When Marie begins listen-

ing to her nuns’ confessions, she hears

stories of rape, molestation, abuse,

murder in self-defense. It is a Me Too

episode made possible by her breaking

the rules, because the nuns had been

unwilling to reveal their traumas to

a male confessor. Marie then boldly

rewrites the prayer books to suit her

community, sneaking to the scripto-

rium to “change the Latin of the mis-

sals and psalters into the feminine, for

why not when it is meant to be heard

and spoken only by women?” This is a

clever nod to the way medieval women

adapted books of prayer and instruc-

tion for their own purposes by using

feminine pronouns and forms (“ab-

bess” instead of “abbot”), but other

signs of Marie’s progressive credentials

are more wishful.

When young Marie is faced with

the exhausting grunt work of the mon-

astery, she begins to empathize with

her childhood servant: “Marie has

never scrubbed a thing in her life. She

wonders, hands aching, how Cecily

did not hate her.” Another privilege

check follows much later, when Cecily

reminds Marie that she is not a self-

made woman but “molded by others,

her mother, her ferocious aunts, her

books, her money.” Marie may be enti-

tled, but Groff is careful to let us know

that she is not at all anti-Semitic, as

any twelfth-century abbess would most

likely have been. Learning of the fall

of Jerusalem, Marie worries that “Jews

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