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Sex and Murder in Maggie O’Farrell’s Overwrought Historical Drama

“The Marriage Portrait” is the fictionalized story of the 16th-century Italian noblewoman Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici.

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By Dwight Garner

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THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT, by Maggie O’Farrell

Does great sex yield great children? Norman Mailer thought so (of course), but other writers have circled this topic, too. If you have a blah night in bed when you and your partner conceive, maybe it’s a karma thing — maybe you’ll have a blah kid.

Early in Maggie O’Farrell’ s new novel, “The Marriage Portrait,” the Duchess Eleanora finishes making love with her husband, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The year is 1544. The setting: a palace in Florence.

The grand duke wraps up happily, and mightily, with “his habitual howling gasp,” but Eleanora knows something is amiss. She’d been inattentive, staring at troubling images on the walls — maps filled with “strange and wild seas, filled with dragons and monsters” — instead of keeping her mind on her own storied fecundity.

Her previous children are well mannered. But Lucrezia, who emerges nine months later? She is “squalling,” “intractable,” “unbiddable,” “inconsolable” and “savage.” Like an animal, she prefers to eat her food off the floor. She screams for days; she’s banished to the basement kitchen.

We get it: Lucrezia is a pint-size hell-raiser. By Page 15 of “The Marriage Portrait,” we also get that this historical novel is verging on the steamy and operatic. Then we’re introduced to the tiger, and we should talk about the tiger.

The grand duke wants the animal to complete his menagerie, because tigers are (cue the hammy Vincent Price vocals) “vicious, singular beasts.” This is about where “The Marriage Portrait” begins to boil over and the C.G.I. effects kick into motion.

“The tigress didn’t so much pace as pour herself,” O’Farrell writes, “as if her very essence was molten, simmering, like the ooze from a volcano.” Ooze is the right word.

She continues: “The animal was orange, burnished gold, fire made flesh; she was power and anger, she was vicious and exquisite.” The tiger’s cry is a “yearning, desperate rasp.”

O’Farrell is most notably the author of “Hamnet,” a largely fictional account of the life and early death of Shakespeare’s son; it won a National Book Critic’s Circle prize in 2021. Some of the prickliest and most committed readers I know take “Hamnet” seriously.

“Hamnet” wasn’t ridiculous in the way that “The Marriage Portrait” is ridiculous; at its best it was an affecting portrait of grief. But it too went in for lush atmospherics, for a lot of rustling leaves, for creating scenes that longed to be bowers of enchantment.

It, too, had few sharp perceptions, little wit and little humble sense of life as it is lived down near the ground. Reading each I pined instead for — the reason one goes to a good restaurant — something simple and unpretending.

A.S. Byatt once told The Paris Review that to read Tolkien, you need to do so primitively. “If you start thinking ,” Byatt said, “you’ve got to stop reading.” Maybe that’s the trick with “Hamnet” and “The Marriage Portrait,” too.

(My favorite O’Farrell novel is the earthier “ Instructions for a Heatwave, ” from 2013, in which a young woman arriving in New York does so “like someone who trips when they enter a room.”)

“The Marriage Portrait” tells the somewhat true story of Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici, who at 15 was forced by her parents to marry the older Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, thus merging two dynasties.

Alfonso spirits her away to a different palace, where she suffers. She is subject to totalitarian surveillance. She is kept largely to herself, but like Van Gogh she has a great ear. She can hear intrigue through walls and around the corners of passageways.

Outside, nature is, like the tiger, vicious and exquisite. The Po River laps at its banks with “lassitudinous ochre tongues.” Inside, Lucrezia’s heart is fearsome and full: “Flames, vibrant and consoling, lick at her insides, a fire kindles, cracks and smolders.”

When she speaks, others lean in, “as if every syllable Lucrezia spoke was a fragile airborne filament of gold.”

In the first chapter we learn that Alfonso probably intends to kill Lucrezia, in part because she has been unable, though the fault is his, to conceive an heir. As with “Hamnet,” scenes jump artily back and forth in time, postponing this reckoning.

A second sort of reckoning looms. Lucrezia will have to sleep with Alfonso at some point, and the moment is delayed for as long as possible. Things build to a crescendo Bernard Herrmann would envy. The sex is as awful as we know it will be: “burning, invading, unwelcome.”

But a dynasty is at stake, and Lucrezia must be ruthlessly pollinated. The novel’s later sex scenes have overtones of “The Shape of Water,” the Guillermo del Toro movie.

Alfonso becomes like “a river god, a water monster” with “the hidden gills in his neck pulsing and pulsing.” His face is a “grotesque mask above her: a face of fury, of intent, of unslakable need.”

You hope Lucrezia might be fertilized by a shower of light, the way Zeus impregnated Danae, and thus spared. You also hold out hope that this victim will ultimately become a destroyer.

Murder and unwanted sex are primal drivers of narrative. In this novel the characters are so one-dimensional and overwrought that the force of neither driver lands. The novelist begins to resemble a conjurer forcing cards.

Anyway, as Elizabeth Hardwick put it, “If I want a plot I’ll watch ‘Dallas.’”

THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT , by Maggie O’Farrell | 348 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008. His most recent book is “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany.” More about Dwight Garner

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The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell review – a dark Renaissance fable

Inspired by Robert Browning’s poem My Last Duchess, this follow-up to Hamnet mingles fact, portraiture and poetic fantasy for the simple tale of a girl forced into marriage

H ere is a novel inspired by a poem describing a painting portraying a young woman who actually lived. Art and artifice are intrinsic to it. 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.

In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. A year after entering her husband’s court in 1560, aged just 16, she died. Poison was suspected. Several portraits of Lucrezia survive. 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. 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.

Admirers of O’Farrell’s previous historical novel, Hamnet , may be nonplussed by this one. 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. There is a virgin heroine whose floor-length red hair, modestly confined in a pearl-decorated net, hints at rebellious energy. There is a devilish duke, handsome and cruel. Sisters come in pairs – the good (beautiful) one and the cross, ugly one. There is an old nurse whose gruff manner masks a kindly heart. There is the pure-hearted young man who might, perhaps, offer rescue.

These stock figures are surrounded by fabulous beasts. Lucrezia’s father keeps a menagerie in the cellars of his palace. When Lucrezia is a tiny child she demonstrates her specialness by reaching through the bars of a cage and stroking a tiger, unharmed. Later, but still in the nursery, she reveals another superpower, a skill in perspectival drawing that impresses the artist Giorgio Vasari. She paints pictures of birds, dead or captive, avatars of her imprisoned self. When Duke Alfonso is being kind he gives her a white mule. When he is being frightening he talks about killing wild boar, a sow and her young. Lucrezia herself feels that there is a beast within her that could one day “crawl out into the light, blinking, bristling, unfurling its filthy fists and opening its jagged red mouth”.

These animals, like the fantastic creatures writhing through the “grotteschi” decorations of Italian Renaissance palaces, hint at the untamed impulses contained by courtly rituals and cumbersome dresses. This is a book about a picture, and it is also pictorial. There is a lot going on in it under and around the surface narrative, in the way that there are other stories being enacted in the backgrounds of Renaissance paintings of biblical scenes. Late in the story, there is a banquet in the castle in Ferrara, when Lucrezia hears for the first time the singing of two castrati. As she listens, the narrative gaze moves around the table – lighting on a spaniel lapping at a dish, a woman wearing stuffed songbirds as ornaments in her hair, a man lasciviously handling a bowl of fruit. It could be a scene painted by Paolo Veronese .

O’Farrell’s prose, as fluent as ever, is more ornate than in earlier books. She alternates passages of plain prose with others rich in musical cadences and lavishly decorated with imagery and heightened vocabulary. A river laps at its banks “with lassitudinous ochre tongues”. A dress speaks a “glossolalia all of its own”, rustling and creaking, becoming an orchestra, or the rigging of a ship. Through similes and allusions more beasts enter the story, more complex emotions. Alfonso in the act of sex becomes a “water monster … seizing her with his webbed fingers, rubbing her with his scaled skin, the hidden gills in his neck pulsing and pulsing”.

The book opens on the night before he plans to kill Lucrezia. By the end of the first paragraph we know that she knows it. Short chapters recounting the events of the following hours alternate with much longer ones giving us the backstory from her childhood onwards. The entire narrative is framed by her impending murder. When she believes Alfonso loves her we are alive to the bitter irony. When she is momentarily afraid of him we know she is right to be. Horror stains the narrative, introduced by dreams and fantasies, and by the terrible screams Lucrezia hears one night, coming from her husband’s room in a battlemented tower of Ferrara’s grim castle. This horror, though, is never quite fully felt. In a surprise ending, which suggests O’Farrell doesn’t believe in it herself, she allows us to escape it.

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As a child I approached history through fiction written by early 20th-century female novelists. Favourites included Violet Needham (The Woods of Windri), Margaret Irwin (Royal Flush), and – most pertinently here, in terms of subject matter – Marjorie Bowen’s darkly gorgeous The Viper of Milan, much admired by Graham Greene. Needham wrote for children. Irwin did not, but she took a girl (Minette, youngest child of Charles I) as her protagonist. Bowen was herself only 16 when she wrote The Viper: in 1906 it was repeatedly turned down by publishers shocked that such a young female author should be drawn to matters so unladylike. The Marriage Portrait belongs on the shelf alongside these classics. Finely written and vividly imagined, it is far from being simplistic, but there is an engaging simplicity to it that makes it feel not quite like a grown-up novel. Rather, it is a very good one to be read, as publishers used to say, by “children of all ages”.

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In Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘The Marriage Portrait,’ matrimony leads to death

“ The Marriage Portrait ” drops us into the panicked mind of a teenage girl who knows her husband is plotting to kill her. In a few months, she’ll be dead.

That certainty must have been alarming for the girl, but it’s an ongoing challenge for the author. Where, after all, is the suspense in a doomed life?

Fortunately, this author is Maggie O’Farrell, one of the most exciting novelists alive. Two years ago, she published “ Hamnet ,” about William Shakespeare’s only son. The novel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, created a devastating charge of tension and sorrow, despite the fact that almost nothing is known about little Hamnet except his death in 1596.

“The Marriage Portrait” exhumes a similarly fated youngster: Lucrezia, the daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Like Hamnet, Lucrezia has fallen into the footnotes of history. But she survives — “looking as if she were alive” — in Robert Browning’s grimly ironic poem, “My Last Duchess.”

The facts of this case are thin and sad. Lucrezia was born into the legendary Italian family in 1545. One of her sisters was supposed to marry Alfonso II d’Este, the future Duke of Ferrara, but she died before the ceremony. Like some Renaissance edition of “The Bachelor,” Lucrezia took her place. At the age of 16, before celebrating her first wedding anniversary, she was buried in her husband’s mausoleum.

Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Hamnet’ is one of the 10 best books of 2020

The records suggest that Lucrezia probably died of tuberculosis, but rumors have persisted for more than 400 years that her ambitious husband poisoned her. O’Farrell creeps into this gloomy realm of intrigue with an inkwell full of blood and a stiletto for her pen.

The events of “The Marriage Portrait” come to us out of order, a structure that reflects Lucrezia’s dislocation and heightens our dread. In the opening paragraph, we find the young Duchess sitting with her husband at a long dining table in a dark, high-walled lodge deep in the forest. Lucrezia can’t help but notice that the building feels strangely empty of people — or witnesses. “It comes to her with a peculiar clarity,” O’Farrell writes, “that he intends to kill her.” The setting and the girl’s sudden premonition feel like something from Edgar Allan Poe. “The certainty that he means her to die is like a presence beside her, as if a dark-feathered bird of prey has alighted on the arm of her chair.”

In that moment of clarifying terror, she becomes a curious observer of her own plight. “She turns her eyes on to her husband, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and wonders what will happen next.” Such is the power of O’Farrell’s storytelling that we do too.

Over the next 300 pages, the novel sweeps back and forth, first filling out the remarkable circumstances of Lucrezia’s adolescence in Tuscany. O’Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave this story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station. Her father’s palace seems to shift in the light. “Sometimes,” O’Farrell writes, “it felt to her like the safest place in the world, a stone keep with a high garrison perimeter to enclose the Grand Duke’s children like a cabinet for glass figurines; at others it felt as oppressive as a prison.”

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Transferred against her will to Alfonso’s household, she feels the same oppressive sense of containment — but with the added concern that her dead sister is haunting her and her new husband is planning her demise. But why?

O’Farrell’s manipulation of time and point of view keeps us vacillating between sympathy and skepticism. After all, Alfonso may be firm, even brutal with his subjects, but this is 16th-century Italy; his political and literal survival depends upon consistently projecting power. “To rule as he does, so well, so decisively,” a member of the court observes, “you need to be entirely heartless.” But in all his dealings with his teenage wife, is Alfonso not appropriately courtly and solicitous? Is there not something paranoid and delusional about Lucrezia’s obsession with “his pretense, his dissembling, his lying looks”?

“No, it is impossible,” she realizes in a happier moment. “She must be mistaken, he must love her after all, he must treasure and respect her, because no one would kiss someone like this, with passion and heat and mouth and the slash of a tongue-tip, would they?”

Oh, Lucrezia. . . .

Turn a page of this novel, and the shadows cast upon the stone walls look ominous. Suddenly, it seems possible that with all his concern and reassurances, Alfonso is gaslighting his young wife — or, I suppose, candle lighting her. Bored out of her mind, her life feels equally dire and absurd. “What is a woman supposed to do when she suspects her husband of trying to murder her?” Lucrezia wonders, as though she were confronting the challenge of making dinner plans for a picky eater.

While she scurries around her husband’s castle, we can hear echoes of “ Yellow Wall-Paper ,” that late 19th-century classic by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a young mother being driven mad by her husband’s overbearing concern. But in this case, it’s the pressure to become a mother that’s warping the household, ratcheting up pressure on Lucrezia to conceive an heir for an imperiled dukedom. How long can an enterprising young ruler wait for her to provide what’s needed? (The sex scenes, with “the heat, the labour, the noise of it,” convey all the romance of a barn raising.)

Lucrezia’s only respite comes from painting, a diversion she began in her parents’ house and continues, for a time, in Alfonso’s. She’s particularly interested in the painters her husband hires to create her portrait — until, that is, she begins to suspect that the portrait, with its shocking acuity, may be intended to replace her. It doesn’t help when Alfonso admires the finished painting and sighs, “There she is . . . my first duchess.” A slip of the tongue, surely, nothing more.

You may know the history, and you may think you know what’s coming, but don’t be so sure. O’Farrell and Lucrezia, with her “crystalline, righteous anger,” will always be one step ahead of you.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

On Oct. 15 at 3 p.m., Maggie O’Farrell will discuss “The Marriage Portrait” with Ron Charles at Politics and Prose , 5015 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington.

The Marriage Portrait

By Maggie O’Farrell

Knopf. 339 pp. $28

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A Duchess Fights to Survive a Poisonous Court in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait

Brimming with intrigue and an ill-fated romance, this novel, based on aristocrat Lucrezia de’ Medici’s life, unfolds with thriller-level suspense.

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The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell’s glittering, propulsive new novel, could have been titled The Beautiful and Damned (with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald) . Set in late-Renaissance Italy, amid the opulence and intrigue of dynastic politics, the book limns the brief life and mysterious death of the aristocratic Lucrezia de’ Medici (1545-1561), third daughter and fifth child of Cosimo, the vigorous, Machiavellian Duke of Florence, and his brilliant Spanish wife, Eleonora. Less than a century after the court of Lorenzo “Il Magnifico” de’ Medici dazzled Tuscany, with its artists and philosophers, and its embarrassment of riches, the family’s prominence has ebbed, necessitating an infusion of wealth and dynamism. Lucrezia, aged 13, is married off to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, a decade older, fulfilling her father’s wish for an alliance between the two city-states. (Her older sister, Maria, had been promised to Alfonso but died of an infection just after her betrothal.) This barter—a young woman’s future for social prestige—fuels O’Farrell’s tale of yearning and betrayal.

In the chilly winter of 1561, at the age of 16, Lucrezia rides with her husband on horseback to a lodge in a secluded forest, appeasing his whim. He’s a courtly Heathcliff: She both fears and adores him, the broad span of his shoulders, his handsome face and quirky humor. He’s also tender to his bride. But at their first dinner in the lodge, she’s struck, like a bolt out of the sky, with the realization that Alfonso wants her dead; his charming facade masks a devil. (His sister has confided that he’s capable of anything.) He feeds her soup and venison, douses her with wine, as she imagines herself floating against the ceiling, peering down on the preamble to her death as if watching a play in a theater. (O’Farrell employs a disembodied motif in several scenes . ) The next morning, a sudden illness surges through her body. Isolated, she can’t summon help; all she can do is plot an escape, aided by her loyal Tuscan servant, Emilia.

O’Farrell shifts between Lucrezia’s final days at the lodge with the duchess’s backstory, beginning with her conception in the map room of her parents’ palazzo . Eleonora later blames those maps for her daughter’s adventurous, stubborn personality, a kind of magical thinking. By day, Lucrezia absorbs lessons from her tutors like a prodigy, prompting her sisters on their Greek and Latin while evincing a talent for drawing, a mastery of the Renaissance breakthrough of perspectival methods, such as the vanishing point. At night, she slips away from the nursery she shares with her siblings and Sofia, their toothless guardian, a wisp of a girl traipsing along secret passages and the palace’s battlements. She’s a daughter of privilege with a rebellious streak, more at home with the wild animals in her father’s menagerie than among courtiers and cardinals.

O’Farrell pivots off her acclaimed previous novel, Hamnet ; there’s the same alluring attention to textures—candlelit dinners, brocaded fabrics, the odors of sex—and, more critically, the theme of women’s lives circumscribed by paternalistic societies and merciless expectations. After the wedding, Lucrezia sits for her portrait, musing on her fate, the rules that consign her to a life she would never have chosen. Like Hamnet ’s Agnes, Lucrezia is an appealing, assertive guide, comfortable in her skin and daring to trade the luxuries of status for a more authentic self.

O’Farrell’s technique beguiles, underscoring Lucrezia’s rising panic, as in this repetition of “husband” and the innovative use of appositive clauses: “Her husband, who means to kill her, either by her own hand or by his order to another, takes up the end of his napkin and dabs at his cheek with its pointed corner, as if a spot of soup on one’s face is a matter of importance. Her husband, who intends her death, spends a moment brushing a stray hair from his brow, then finally tucks it behind his ear. Her husband, the murderer, says, over his shoulder to the servants, that the cook should be told to add more salt. As if seasoning is more important to them now. Her husband, who will kill her before long, reaches out, as if he means to fold her cold fingers into his palm. It is this that proves too much for her. She startles into life, moves her hand away, picking up her spoon and dipping it into her bowl.”

The Marriage Portrait: A novel

Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy looms large here, announcing itself in O’Farrell’s lush descriptions and grasp of politics; but The Marriage Portrait, while fluently written and a page-turner, lacks the emotional staying power of Wolf Hall or Hamnet. Still, few writers play as confidently with the nuts and bolts of language, and historical characters netted from the past. O’Farrell adroitly shrinks Lucrezia to her own vanishing point, even if the probable cause of the duchess’s demise was a pulmonary embolism rather than poison. O’Farrell’s creative license beautifully frames the chasms that open up between husband and wife, implicating an institution that has galvanized our canonical writers, including the Victorian poet Robert Browning, whose dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” was inspired by Branzino’s portrait of Lucrezia. As Browning’s speaker says of the painting: “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands / As if alive.”

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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Mel Reviews Her Books

Book Review: ‘The Marriage Portrait’ by Maggie O’Farrell

My, oh my, oh my! Now you all know how much I ADORED and have RAVED about ‘Devotion’ by Hannah Kent ( CLICK HERE to read my review). If you have met me in the bookstore, I can guarantee I have put any and all of Hannah Kent’s books in your hands. For me to say that THIS BOOK – ‘The Marriage Portrait’ by Maggie O’Farrell, comes in as a close contender as one of my favourite books of 2022 is big. It’s BIG people!

‘The Marriage Portrait’ by Maggie O’Farrell is well paced novel curated to intrigue and explore the devastatingly controlled life of Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara. By the age of 15 she was married to a Duke for the purposes of political and land gain. By 16 she was dead.

Set in the mid 1500’s, our opening scene introduces us to Lucrezia and her husband Alfonzo, as they dine for the very last time together before he supposedly, *as history believes * poisons her. This scene is chilling as we’re in the mind of a 16 year old girl who is contemplating what her life has come to and what to expect will come next. We then flash back in time to Lucrezia’s birth and the disconnected relationship she has growing up within her Medici family.

Lucrezia is the somewhat middle child Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Eleanor of Toledo. If you know your Italian history, you’d know that the Medici lineage is one of the most infamous and long ruling families/Italian royalty. The marriage of Cosimo and Eleanor was a loving one, yet Eleanor’s expression of love towards Lucrezia was never the same compared to her other children.

Lucrezia had a milk mother (or wet nurse as the role is more commonly known), of whom was lower class. Lucrezia’s early life was spent in the cook room, playing with her milk mother’s daughter and not learning the skills of her royal family. This resulted in her being somewhat of an outcast with her siblings and also when it came to linear education. Her art was how she expressed herself from a very young age and it followed throughout her short life. She also has an unusually calm connection to animals.

Lucé’s connection to animals comes to the forefront of the novel when there is a piercing scene with herself, her siblings and her father, Cosimo. It was hard to remove this picture from my mind throughout the rest of the story. Maggie O’Farrell brings so much truth to Lucé’s story and it was actually rumoured that in real life, Cosmio held a collection of exotic animals in the basement of the Palazzo Vecchio. The fictional scene follows Lucrezia as she witnesses the arrival of a new animal, a tiger. She is possessed by its beauty, power and its inability to fit in with the other animals. She feel connection and comfort with this animal. They speak the same emotional and mental language. As she falls behind the group, she reached her hand in the tiger’s cage and awaits its presence. Slowly, the animal comes to her and connecting with her hand is the animals fur. It sees Lucé, it feels her, it knows her. They are two creatures but their feelings are that of one. Her Father, terrified to turn and see this animal near his daughter, seeks to destroy the animal immediately. This is ultimately a turning point in the novel.

I believe this pivotal scene mimics Lucé’s future courtship and marriage with Alfonso. He sees her as beautiful, powerful and caged. He takes advantage of this young, innocent and disconnected creature. His pure use for her is to produce heirs, yet down the line we learn that this is something that does not come easily for him.

I was seized by this story immediately and I believe you will be too. I wanted to learn about how this young girl had experienced a life completely out of her control. The 1500’s time period is one I have not explored a great deal before and Italian history is always something I will jump to read considering my own heritage. I am now adding all of Maggie O’Farrell’s books to my TBR because her writing was just spectacular. I don’t think any other author I’ve read before has made me feel the way she has. Perhaps Hannah Kent would truly be the closest. The ending of this novel was also the perfect way to close the fictional story of the beautiful Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara. I am still thinking of this novel months after reading a prerelease copy – I am glad to finally place it in book lovers hands this September.

Lucé’s love for art is her saviour at different times throughout the novel. Yet, when it comes to her famous marriage portrait arranged by Alfonso, she is taken with how the different forms of art can depict a scene or moment of a person. Her own portrait is created by a collection of specialsed artists, one of whom is selective mute – or so we think. His name is Jacopo. Jacopo will go on to play an important role in Lucé life, whether that be fictional or true – I do not know.

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The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

• Publication Date: July 11, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Vintage
• ISBN-10: 0593315081
• ISBN-13: 9780593315088
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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the marriage portrait.

At one point last year, it seemed like everyone I knew, even those who don’t normally search out historical fiction, was reading Maggie O’Farrell’s Shakespeare-inspired novel, HAMNET. Whether you’re the kind of person who frequently enjoys time-traveling through fiction, or you’ve been holding out for a second trip back in time with O’Farrell, you’re in luck: THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT is another richly imagined, suspenseful, feminist historical novel.

This time, O’Farrell takes her readers to the late Italian Renaissance, in the 1550s and 1560s, and the subject of a poem that might be familiar to many: Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” which is narrated by Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara, in northern Italy. Here, however, O’Farrell flips the script and tells the story of Alfonso’s bride, the one who was portrayed in the portrait at the center of the poem. She was Lucrezia, part of the eminent Medici family of Florence, who died at age 16, only a year after marrying the duke.

"I fully expect that over the next few months, this unforgettable book will be the historical novel that everyone is reading and fervently discussing."

In THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT, O’Farrell imagines Lucrezia’s childhood in the Florentine court, her love of animals and learning, along with her free spirit. She also recounts the history of Lucrezia’s betrothal at a young age to Alfonso; he previously had been betrothed to her older sister, who died before they could wed. She illustrates the close and loving relationship of Lucrezia to her nursemaid, who ingeniously protected her from marriage for as long as she could.

O’Farrell intersperses these scenes of youth and childhood with later scenes of Lucrezia’s marriage to Alfonso --- from their idyllic honeymoon at a country estate to her eventual presentation at court. Further ramping up the suspense are dread-filled scenes of the couple several months later, at a remote and isolated fortress, where Lucrezia has become convinced that Alfonso intends to kill her because she has not yet produced an heir.

O’Farrell’s storytelling is masterful. Most scenes are told from Lucrezia’s perspective, and they build a complex and nuanced picture not only of this bright and sensitive young woman but also of those who surround her. They include her ladies’ maid, the artist commissioned to paint that titular portrait, her new sisters-in-law, and Alfonso himself, who is portrayed initially as thoughtful and kind but whose cruelties and desperation become increasingly apparent --- and troubling --- as the narrative unfolds.

Lucrezia is written as a girl whose intellect and talents, particularly her skills in languages and art, are underappreciated by the society in which she lives. Readers will find themselves mourning how the spirited and creative Lucrezia’s potential is reduced to her ability to procreate. Most striking is her depiction of Lucrezia as an artist with an artist’s eye. Even as she travels through the countryside or arrives at Ferrara’s court, she is always observing, taking in the sights in exquisite detail: “An elderly couple, arm in arm, stand by a vendor selling woven baskets, the man leaning towards his wife, speaking into her ear, as if explaining what is before them. As Lucrezia rides by, she sees that the woman’s eyes are occluded, sightless, her face turned up towards the sky, as if appealing to its power, as if its brightness is the only thing she can see.”

Readers might imagine, given their familiarity with Browning’s poem and based on the historical note with which O’Farrell opens her novel, that they know how Lucrezia’s story will end. But the author and her heroine have a lot of tricks up their sleeves, and readers will remain guessing until the final pages. I fully expect that over the next few months, this unforgettable book will be the historical novel that everyone is reading and fervently discussing.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl on September 16, 2022

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

• Publication Date: July 11, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Vintage
• ISBN-10: 0593315081
• ISBN-13: 9780593315088

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• Seen & Heard

‘The Marriage Portrait’ Is Reese’s Book Club Pick

BY Michael Schaub • Dec. 5, 2022

Reese Witherspoon has selected Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait  as the latest pick for her influential book club.

O’Farrell’s novel, published in September by Knopf, is a fictional account of the life of Lucrezia de’Medici, a 16th-century teenage girl who was married to a duke and died at 16, sparking rumors that she was poisoned by her husband. A critic for Kirkus called the book a “compelling portrait of a young woman out of step with her times.”

The Marriage Portrait is O’Farrell’s first novel for adults since Hamnet , her 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award–winning book about the family of William Shakespeare. In an interview with the Seattle Times , she said she was inspired to write the new novel after rereading Robert Browning’s poem about de’Medici, “My Last Duchess.”

On Instagram, Witherspoon posted a brief video showing her reading the book, with the caption, “When the book is a true story & you can’t stop Googling…”

“You know I love historical fiction...and with a true crime element? I’m in!” Witherspoon wrote. “I could not stop Googling all the details of this true story! It’s a fascinating, historical thriller about an Italian Duchess, who we learn at the very beginning of the book will die either by sickness...or by her husband’s hand. I can’t wait to hear what you think!”

Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.

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BookBrowse Reviews The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

The Marriage Portrait

by Maggie O'Farrell

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• Historical Fiction
• 17th Century or Earlier
• Strong Women
• Top 20 Best Books of 2022

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A historical thriller that merges art, history and power politics into a compelling alternate biography.

The idea of marrying for love is a startlingly recent development. It seems natural, in our society that has built stories, movies and an entire wedding industry around the idea that marriage is an expression of true love. But in earlier centuries, marriage was a political and economic arrangement with love considered, at best, a happy accident, and as Maggie O'Farrell shows in her historical novel The Marriage Portrait , those arrangements could have fatal consequences for wives. O'Farrell brings to life early modern Italy while also masterfully inhabiting the mind of a bright yet awkward girl. The lead character and object of the portrait in the title is Lucrezia de' Medici, an actual daughter of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who is believed to have been born in 1545. O'Farrell presents an alternate telling of the life of this obscure yet tragic character from Renaissance history. The book begins with Lucrezia's realization that her husband means to murder her while they're at a remote castle. The story then loops back through her childhood and adolescence, with chapters periodically jumping to her in the castle trying to avoid her husband's violent intentions. This structure lets the reader watch Lucrezia grow from a smart, artistically gifted girl into a perceptive young woman. Lucrezia's happy childhood is upended when her eldest sister, who was betrothed to Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, suddenly dies, and the duke requests Lucrezia's hand instead. O'Farrell's attention to detail and historical accuracy are outstanding, from the names of Cosimo's advisors to Alfonso's family history, and she crafts his contradictory character skillfully. Lucrezia is terrified of marriage and leaving home, particularly since she is barely a teenager when she marries Alfonso, who is in his mid-20s. At first, however, her husband seems caring and kind. Alfonso indulges Lucrezia's love of animals and painting, and he betrays no disappointment in marrying the quiet and bookish girl rather than her older, more glamorous sister. Yet warning signs appear almost immediately — that beneath his calm exterior, Alfonso is a cruel and vindictive man; that his political position is tenuous and he'll kill to maintain it; that the people surrounding Lucrezia are using her for their own ends. Alfonso and Lucrezia soon travel to the city-state of Ferrara in northern Italy, the seat of his power. Yet Alfonso's mother, a Protestant refusing to practice Catholicism, has caused chaos by fleeing to France along with one of her daughters. With no heir to guarantee succession and his mother and sister politically protected in France, Alfonso runs the risk of being replaced by his sister's child, which would allow his mother, sister and their faction of the family to gain power. Alfonso's other sisters who stay in Ferrara quickly pull Lucrezia into their power politics, but she learns that their acts of friendship are insincere. She also realizes that only by providing Alfonso with an heir can she ensure her own safety. Her role as a wife is to guarantee that the dynasty continues, and Alfonso is not a man to let feelings interfere with that fact. But the heir doesn't come — and everyone at court knows Alfonso has never even fathered a bastard out of wedlock. As a result, rumors swirl that he can't safeguard the succession. All the while, Alfonso's chosen artists are working on a portrait of Lucrezia, a beautiful work that mirrors her own love of painting yet begins to take on a life of its own. O'Farrell correctly depicts how master artists worked in groups during the Renaissance, with apprentices and assistants handling different aspects of sketching and painting a commission like this one. Lucrezia's sessions with the artists become one of her few outlets in an increasingly claustrophobic life at court. Alfonso's attempts to impregnate his wife grow more fervent, with medieval doctors prescribing cures and barring Lucrezia from her only joys, painting and exploring the castle. His anger with his sisters becomes more violent, as does his frustration with the still-childless Lucrezia, and she finally understands that not giving birth to an heir will be her downfall. As the story builds, O'Farrell circles back to where the novel began, with Lucrezia at the castle, cognizant that Alfonso wants to murder her. The pace of the two timelines crescendos perfectly, coming together in the terrifying yet exhilarating resolution that brings together Alfonso, Lucrezia and the artists and courtiers around them. This structure gives the book the feel of a murder mystery — Will he or won't he do it? What is he capable of? — and the simmering undercurrents of danger draw the reader in, enveloping us in Lucrezia's fear and confusion, but also her intelligence and bravery. At the same time, O'Farrell's historical accuracy avoids dryness, and while she takes some artistic liberties with the actual biography of Lucrezia de Medici, her depiction of life in 16th-century Florence and Ferrara are lively and colorful, made real for a 21st-century audience. By shortening the distance between Lucrezia's lifetime and our own, O'Farrell also makes the risks of succession and reproduction patently clear for modern readers. She provides a glimpse of the terror, pride, hope, danger and sometimes affection that marriage entailed for early modern women, all within an exciting and fast-paced tale.

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The Marriage Portrait: A novel Hardcover – September 6, 2022

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Knopf
• Publication date September 6, 2022
• Dimensions 6.52 x 1.24 x 9.53 inches
• ISBN-10 059332062X
• ISBN-13 978-0593320624
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First United States Edition (September 6, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 059332062X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593320624
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.41 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.52 x 1.24 x 9.53 inches
• #10 in Renaissance Literary Criticism (Books)
• #41 in Renaissance Historical Fiction (Books)
• #2,948 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Maggie o'farrell.

Maggie O’Farrell, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is the author of HAMNET, Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I AM, I AM, I AM, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include AFTER YOU’D GONE, MY LOVER’S LOVER, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX, THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE and THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT. She is also the author of two books for children, WHERE SNOW ANGELS GO and THE BOY WHO LOST HIS SPARK. She lives in Edinburgh.

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Book Review: The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

Feb 9, 2023 | Book Reviews , historical fiction | 12 comments

Because it’s February, I’ve chosen three books to read that all center on the topic of love and marriage for my latest radio segment (it’s showbiz folks, you don’t need to be that creative!). The first was The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell , which I dug out of my bookshelf after reading a very insightful review of it from Karissa here . Although a tad long for my tastes, it was a particularly successful example of a slow burn suspense, the atmosphere growing steadily darker until the very last page.

Plot Summary

It’s 1560, and fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici has been married off to Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. After only a year of marriage she is pronounced dead of fever, but it is rumoured that she was murdered by her husband. All 430 pages are written in Lucrezia’s first-person perspective, alternating between two time periods; her childhood, and shortly after the one-year mark of her marriage when she suspects her husband is plotting to kill her. The timelines eventually meet at the very end of the book when we discover the true intentions of Alfonso. We meet him early on in the novel when he is betrothed to Lucrezia’s older sister Maria, who dies suddenly after falling ill. To maintain the fortuitous linking of the two families, Lucrezia is offered instead, and they are married in an ostentatious ceremony that frightens her, as it is the first time she has been allowed out of her family’s property limits. That evening she is whisked away by Alfonso to his castle, a few days journey distance, where she is met with disdain and suspicion. She lives essentially as his prisoner, her only task to provide an heir for this bloodline to continue without interruption, securing his lineage and its associated titles. This hoped-for pregnancy does not go as planned.

My Thoughts

Lucrezia is a young woman of contradictions. Her family describes her as untamable, erratic even, prone to emotional fits, yet the reader has to keep reminding themselves that we only know her as a young child and teenager – who isn’t emotional at that point in their lives? To be married off to a man you have never met, when you’ve never even been touched by a man other than your father by that point in your life? Unthinkable to a person in 2023, but it’s understandably upsetting to a 15-year-old in the 1550s too, even if that was the end goal of her entire existence anyway. She acknowledges her limited autonomy throughout the book once it dawns on her that her union is not going to be a happy one:

“Her father would have found her an advantageous match because that is, after all, what she has been bought up for: to be married, to be used as a link in his chains of power, to produce heirs for men like Alfonso.” -p. 282 of the ARC of The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

To be clear, the match is considered advantageous to the two men of each family, not Lucrezia herself. Her feelings and emotions are never considered by others in any part of the story, and the reader and her maids are the only people to understand how she truly feels.

The character of Alfonso is also an interesting one; it quickly becomes clear he is a frightening person, ruthless and prone to fits of violence and anger. But when we first meet him on the arm of Maria, he comes across as quite the opposite: a handsome stranger who shares a quirky moment with Lucrezia, at once understanding her love of animals and how special they are to her. This honeymoon-like version of Alfonso continues for the first few weeks of their marriage, until his true personality comes through – much like how I imagine most abusive partners to act. The only difference here being that Lucrezia is trapped as she is now the property of her husband, and she’s simply expected to just put up with it.

At a few points in the novel, Lucrezia achieves a sense of freedom by donning her servants’ clothes and creeping around the castle at night, unnoticed. Issues of class are occasionally touched upon here, but O’Farrell is clearly pointing to the hidden burdens that women of wealth bear at that time. Their very movements are limited, so although they are taken care of, to be seen as the plaything of someone else brings its own set of problems. This is a thoughtful book that will make any person grateful to be alive today, but for (most) women in particular it especially points to how far we’ve come.

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12 comments.

Did you read O’Farrell’s Hamnet and Judith? I loved that novel so much. This one I just couldn’t get into.

I haven’t read it, but everyone keeps saying I must!!! One commenter said it brought her to tears!

It was excellent!

Great review! I’m glad you mostly enjoyed this.

thank you! haha

Now, how did you connect a story about a murdered wife to romance and Valentine’s Day? 😂

It was a tenuous connection – love, marriage, etc LOLOLOL

“He was wrong, I shot him.” Wanda Sykes talking about her parents’ marriage.

This sounds good to me… I love a slow burn! And I’ve liked a couple of her other books, although Hamnet wasn’t one of them. We have it on our Literary Wives list, though, so it’s coming!

Everyone raves about Hamnet!

I’m reading this now and am very much enjoying it. I liked Hamnet a lot too.

Oh good to know! Glad you are enjoying. Yes I’ve heard wonderful things about Hamnet as well, that will be next on my Maggie O’Farrell list.

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