The abbey

The entirety of the novel, with the exception of flashbacks to earlier times in Marie's life, takes place at an unnamed abbey in England. Since Marie is based on 12th-century poet Marie de France, it is possible that the abbey is based on the Shaftesbury abbey, which existed in Dorset from the late 8th century through the 16th century. Marie de France lived as abbess there.

When Marie arrives, the abbey is impoverished and the nuns living there are starving and dying from disease. When she sees the abbey for the first time, it appears ominous: "pale and aloof" and "gray and full of shadows" (3). The author names and describes some of the rooms in the abbey, including the dortoir, "where a single lantern burns over the rows of twenty nuns already asleep in their narrow beds" (19), the chapel, the refectory, the infirmary, and the lavatorium.

The...