The Marriage Portrait: A Novel

"The Marriage Portrait is by Maggie O’Farrell , who is a friend. I had read all of her other books and I loved that she was slowly making her way into historical fiction. She did write The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox , but she wrote mostly contemporary novels until Hamnet . I thought she did Hamnet beautifully so when The Marriage Portrait came out, and I saw it was set in Italy—and I was also writing a novel set in Italy—I wondered how she’d done it. Maggie writes so beautifully, just on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Her metaphors and similes are always fresh, and her characters are so deftly and fully written. I just loved this book . It’s the story of a young woman whose older sister dies just before she’s meant to marry, and the fiancé switches over to the younger sister, just like that. That’s pretty bizarre to begin with, but Lucrezia is really young—I think she’s 13 when they’re betrothed. She’s forced to marry Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, and then goes to live with him. He has a painter come to do her portrait—that’s the marriage portrait. It’s celebrating their marriage, but it becomes clear very quickly that she is meant to breed and breed fast and have a baby and have a boy. This does not happen. And the longer that goes on, the clearer it becomes to her, partly through the painter and through outside agents, that she is expendable. The book is really about how she figures out how to make herself not expendable, how she can escape this trap that she’s been forced into. The plot is fine, but what I really loved about the book was the detail of living in this castle-like place, the politics (her husband is a politician), the petty politics, the daily life of the servants and her. It’s just really intricate and yet easy to follow and limpidly written. It’s really beautiful. Yes, “My Last Duchess” is a poem about the painting. A painting does exist of this young woman in real life. And she does die very young. She was ludicrously young, for what she had to go through. The portrait is very mysterious, there’s just something about it. I don’t know what made Maggie write the book, but I suspect she saw the portrait and thought, ‘Oh, wow, there’s a story there.’ That’s what I would have done. That’s what I did!"

"This is by Maggie O’Farrell, who wrote Hamnet , which was a great success last year. In The Marriage Portrait, she takes us to 16th-century Italy and the Medicis. It’s about a child bride, Lucrezia de’Medici, who is the daughter of Cosimo de’Medici. She marries the Duke of Ferrara at the age of 15. This is a true historical event. The actress Genevieve Gaunt, who narrates the audiobook, has the perfect voice for this story. She’s got a huge range of characters she has to do. She has to be a 15-year-old bride, who has a lot of spirit, but she’s up against a huge force in the Duke of Ferrara, who has a deep baritone. Then you’ve got the courtiers, the princes and her maid. The book is beautifully written, so there are lots of descriptions of the court and the palaces and her garments. Genevieve Gaunt captures not only these portraits, which are very powerful and very diverse, but all the details. She makes you feel like you’re there—you’re seeing a table laid with all these foods, or Lucrezia’s gown. You just see it so beautifully. “It has to be an audio experience that people will remember” There’s a lot going on, and it’s embellished a bit in the romance. There’s plenty of melodrama. It’s also scary because not good things happen. That’s true in the history as well. There is a lot of foreshadowing. It’s just great listening. Interestingly, the book reviews in print have been mixed. Lots of people love it but there have been some fairly negative reviews. When I read those I thought, ‘You just didn’t have Genevieve Gaunt telling you this story!’ She just places you there as a listener in 16th-century Italy. Yes, she does the historical note, which is extensive because of the research that she did. After you’ve finished with the story you can listen to that, although some people prefer to listen to the afterword first. There is a portrait of Lucrezia de’Medici attributed to Bronzino. Browning also wrote a poem, “My Last Duchess” about the Duke of Ferrara with a fictional portrait. The book has wonderful references back and forth. A portrait of Lucrezia is also being created in the story."

"O’Farrell’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to Hamnet (which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020) is based on a scandalous real-life story from Renaissance Italy. Young aristocrat Lucrezia de’ Medici was married off at 15 to the much older Duke of Ferrara. The match was brief and unhappy. When the duchess died less than two years later, there were strong suggestions that she had been poisoned on the orders of her powerful husband. O’Farrell’s novel is richly atmospheric and deeply researched, although she has altered some historical details for narrative effect. It met with a somewhat mixed critical reception on publication but has found a wide and largely appreciative fan base. If you enjoy lushly descriptive historical fiction, this will be the book for you."

"The Marriage Portrait offers a glimpse of the luxury and lechery of Renaissance Italy, where Lucrezia moves between gilded cages, adorned in glittering jewels—and all the while sensing her wifely value being weighed and measured. In terms of style, this new novel has been somewhat divisive; its lush, symphonic prose has been dubbed by some as “overwrought” , while others prefer “evocative” . I liked what Claire Allfree had to say about it in The Times : “So headily perfumed is her prose it works on the reader almost like a drug.” Sound good? Then I suspect this historical romance (of a kind) will work for you. Earlier this month, Ian McEwan released his eighteenth novel, Lessons , a sweeping (even sprawling) account of a single man’s life as it intertwines with the major political events of the 20th and early 21st centuries. It opens in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, as Roland Baines’ wife leaves him and his infant son to fend for themselves. Flashing back and forth through time, we take in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as Baines’ personal history—notably a damaging sexual relationship with a piano teacher in early adolescence and its emotional repercussions throughout the rest of his life. Over a period of decades, Baines grows, matures, and ultimately takes stock of the world and his role in it. An ambitious social novel. Barbara Kingsolver ( The Poisonwood Bible , Flight Behaviour ) also returns with Demon Copperhead , which reimagines Charles Dickens ‘s David Copperfield as set in the Appalachian Mountains, transposing that Victorian melodrama into a world of trailer parks, opioid crisis and a creaking foster care system. A true saga with a cast of thousands. Compulsively readable."