The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

When Lucrezia is a tiny child she demonstrates her specialness by reaching through the bars of a cage and stroking a tiger, unharmed. Lucrezia’s father keeps a menagerie in the cellars of his palace. These stock figures are surrounded by fabulous beasts. There is the pure-hearted young man who might, perhaps, offer rescue. There is an old nurse whose gruff manner masks a kindly heart. Sisters come in pairs – the good (beautiful) one and the cross, ugly one. There is a devilish duke, handsome and cruel. There is a virgin heroine whose floor-length red hair, modestly confined in a pearl-decorated net, hints at rebellious energy. Where Hamnet’s emotional punch (read it and weep) was powered by its psychological and social realism, The Marriage Portrait is set in a world as fabulous as that of a millefleurs tapestry and inhabited by beings as flatly emblematic as embroidered ladies and their unicorns. Now O’Farrell has shuffled historical fact, portraiture and poetic fantasy together and used them as the basis for a piece of fiction in which a simple tale, of a girl forced too young into a dynastic marriage, is overlaid and embellished with elements from fairytale and myth.Īdmirers of O’Farrell’s previous historical novel, Hamnet, may be nonplussed by this one. Nearly 300 years after her death, Robert Browning wrote My Last Duchess, a dramatic monologue in which Duke Alfonso displays a portrait of his late wife and allows the reader to deduce that – insanely jealous – he murdered her. A year after entering her husband’s court in 1560, aged just 16, she died. In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. In Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of 16th-century Italian courtly life, manners make the man, clothes make the woman, and an image is more durable than a person. H ere is a novel inspired by a poem describing a painting portraying a young woman who actually lived.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell