Matrix by Lauren Groff
William Heinemann, £16.99, 272 pages
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The 12th-century poet we know as Marie de France was, scholars argue, the greatest writer of short fiction before Boccaccio and Chaucer. Her lais – tantalisingly short romances written in octosyllabic couplets – are thought to rival the best that those great men had to offer. But herein lies the difference: Marie was a woman with all the disadvantages and ignominy her sex had to offer in that most patriarchal of societies, the court of the
middle-ages. Marie, no fool, knew this. Her oft-quoted lai says as much: “Whoever believes in a man is very foolish.”
