It starts with the sort of attention to linguistic detail that is always guaranteed to win me over: My favourite lai is ‘Bisclavret’, one of the oldest werewolf stories out there. This is compounded by the fact that Marie, being female, gives many details about the women involved that male poets so often didn't bother with. Here everything is much more direct, and there is a charmingly ingenuous approach to sex and desire in general. These are poems about illegitimate births, exiled knights, chivalrous deeds and hidden love-affairs – and yet despite all these plot devices, they have very little in common with the kind of adventure romances that would develop later. That's why forms like lais and fabliaux are so appealing: short, narrative works, with lots of dirty jokes and direct explanations. The big Arthurian cycles and the long poems of people like Wace or Chrétien de Troyes – I can only deal with them in small doses. Now, I really like Old French and Anglo-Norman poetry, but some of the classics are so long that reading them seems pretty daunting.
Marie was probably attached to the court of Henry II (who, I need scarcely remind you, was himself French and spoke no English), but apart from that we really know nothing about her except what can be gleaned from her poetry. Probably England: she writes in Anglo-Norman, which is an important language for anyone interested in the history of English because it's the source of so many borrowings. Marie de France was an aristocratic twelfth-century poet, from whose name we conclude that she was apparently living somewhere other than France when she wrote her most famous works.
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