This book offers a fundamental reconception of the person generally assumed to be the first woman writer in French, the author known as Marie de France. It considers all of the writing ascribed to Marie, including her famous 'Lais', her 103 animal fables, and the earliest vernacular 'Saint Patrick's Purgatory'. Evidence about Marie de France's life is so meagre that we know next to nothing about her. In the face of this great writer's near anonymity, scholars have assumed her to be a simple, naive, and modest Christian figure. This book's claim, in contrast, is that Marie is among the most self-conscious, sophisticated, complicated, and disturbing figures of her time.