The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell
“She cannot work with needle and thread-her fingers become stiff and strange to her. Paint is what she loves best, and chalk, and ink. She turns the hoop over and inspects the underside. She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the “wrong” side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.”
“She is a different person from yesterday … She has changed her shape, shed her skin, been painted over, or remade in a new form.”
While reading Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” Maggie O’Farrell realised how quiet the Duchess was and decided to give her voice. Looking at her portrait, by Alessandro Allori, she resolved to write a novel where the narrator and the protagonist seem to intermingle. And that is what we get in The Marriage Portrait, Lucrezia De Medici’s thoughts, dreams, and nightmares, and above all, her expectations and disappointments about marriage life.
Set in Renaissance Italy (in the duchies of Tuscany and Ferrara) we get to look at what lies behind the tapestry of marriage contracts, dynastic politics, and family heirs. We cover and uncover the layers of the many paintings and stories we find within the novel; nothing is what it seems till the end.
In Lucre’s paintings mules become tigers, lovers turn into still lives or into water monsters, in one portrait she is just a wife in the other an artist. The same is true in real life, she must shed layers and wear different masks if she wants to survive in court.
LRB
Critical perspective:
“Though the story’s players are based on real figures, the time and distance that stretch between then and now are more of a barrier here for O’Farrell than it was in her previous, astonishing work, Hamnet, which won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award. But she still manages to infuse the novel with strikingly vivid detail — minute aspects of life in a Renaissance court captured with a delicate attention to every one of the senses. Lucrezia’s rich inner life, her budding creativity as a painter, and an insightfulness that belies her age are treated to O’Farrell’s elegant, transporting prose. Lucrezia passes the time when no one else is around painting scenes from her imagination, only to paint over them to hide her true passion from prying eyes charged with surveilling her, and forms an instant connection with an apprentice portrait painter who speaks in the same provincial dialect as the cherished nursemaid who raised her and whom only she can understand. Granting us access to these small, significant moments, O’Farrell endows Lucrezia with a genuine humanity and gives life to a person whose brief existence could have easily been lost to obscurity.”
https://avenuemagazine.com/the-marriage-portrait-maggie-o-farrell-review/
“…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.”
“Can a novelist be too interested in description? It feels like a churlish question — after all, one of the great joys of reading fiction is delighting in a writer’s particular way with imagery. Maggie O’Farrell is good at imagery ... Yet the question kept bugging me while reading The Marriage Portrait ... So headily perfumed is her prose it works on the reader almost like a drug ... Lucrezia remains the sum of her characteristics rather than springing forth messily alive. Perversely, she seems trapped beneath the weight of O’Farrell’s relentless, admittedly gorgeous descriptions ... The Marriage Portrait rarely provides fresh insight into Renaissance courtly life beyond reminding us that women are childbearing instruments of patriarchal power ... I’m glad I now know of Lucrezia, but The Marriage Portrait is a bloodless book, despite its efforts to bring a forgotten woman back to life.”
About the author:
Maggie O’Farrell is an author and screenwriter. Maggie has co-written the screenplay adaptation of her novel HAMNET (with Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao) for Hera/Neal St/Amblin Entertainment, which has started filming in July 2024 starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. HAMNET was the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Maggie’s novels include THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT under option to Element Pictures, THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award and is under option to Estuary Films, and THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Novel Award and will be produced as a TV series for Amazon, starring Orlando Bloom.
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US won a Somerset Maugham Award; THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award, and INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Her memoir I AM, I AM, I AM became a Sunday Times no 1 bestseller. Her titles have been published in 26 territories and translated into 23 languages.
Maggie’s original work for the screen includes a TV series pilot for Avalon: NATURE, NURTURE.
https://blakefriedmann.co.uk/maggie-ofarrell
On reading for inspiration
‘I would never not read. I’d feel like a musician who never listens to music; it would just be wrong. And actually – especially when you are at a certain stage in your book – it’s such a relief to sink into somebody else’s world and just receive their wisdom and receive their words and their artistry. I like to read lots of new books to see what other writers are coming up with.’
On filling in the gaps
‘In a sense, gaps in history are frustrating for a biographer or historian. But for a novelist, those gaps are quite enticing. They form this kind of vacuum that you are able to step forward and fill with whatever story you yourself want to tell. Because obviously, my Agnes (Hamnet) and my Lucrezia (The Marriage Portrait) are fictional characters – they have the names and the framework of real people, but other than that, I just made it all up.’
On finding a trusted reader
‘My husband is also a writer and we are each other’s first reader. He always reads my second or my third draft – and he can be pretty mean! But you need it. It would be nice if you wrote a first or second draft and whoever you gave it to said, “It’s absolutely perfect, don’t change a word”. But of course, that’s never going to happen. And it’s good that it doesn’t happen, because your work is far from done at those early drafts. When I wrote my novel The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, he read it and said, “It’s okay, but you have to rewrite half of it”, which was a bit of a blow, but he was right – annoyingly!’
On doing your research
‘In order to get a feel for the times and the scenario and the locations, you have to read an awful lot of history about that time, but in order to inhabit the lives of people whose history is written in white or written in water, in a sense, you have to go a bit further and do something a bit different. So to understand what Hathaway’s life was like I did physical things, as well as reading about the time. I planted and grew my own Elizabethan medicinal herb garden. And I went on a course to learn how to make those plants into medicines.’
On doing your research pt.II
‘There’s a lot about art in The Marriage Portrait and I make Lucrezia an artist. And so I ordered raw pigment. And I ground it up and mixed it with linseed oil and oyster shells, which is exactly how people would have painted then. Because I wanted to understand the physicality of it. I made an unbelievable mess. Because I needed to know how hard it was to grind up Lapis Lazuli. And that kind of information doesn’t always end up in the book. But you need to have that sort of knowledge, in a sense, to give yourself the confidence to create a scene in which it happens.’
https://womensprize.com/maggie-ofarrell-on-writing/
Reviews by our book club members:
“The Marriage Portrait" is a fictionalized story about the 16th-century Italian noblewoman Lucrezia de Medici. The novel is a literary portrait of an isolated and inexperienced young woman who knows little beyond the palace walls.
The author, Maggie O´Farrell, skilfully achieves to take us into the mind of Lucrezia with the intention of depicting the duchess as a resilient young woman who is seeking to liberate herself, inviting us to sympathize with her. O´Farrell has written an effective feminist account of the trauma of political marriages for inexperienced girls who have no notion of love and know only obedience and duty.
In my view, the novel is too intimate and at the same time a bit insipid due to the lack of a well-structured plot. It´s a shame the author hasn´t brought out more potential in the characters´ profiles and their interaction between them. However, there are a lot of lush metaphors and minute descriptions of places, and objects that transport and permit us to recreate life in ducal palaces in Renaissance Italy.
In short, if you enjoy this kind of fictional stories and values, you should read this book. You won´t be disappointed.”
JLJG
“The descriptions of the landscape are like a painting, they are sensual, lyrical. I find the account of the marriage act moving, the pain, the astonishment, very realistic. Lucrecia's spiritual flight at that moment. I also find the description of the landscapes interesting, the metaphors, which make us travel through them, feel their humidity, their roughness, their aromas. His paintings of fruit. The description of the storm could be a painting. Alfonso is a case of personality disorder.”
PRR
Praise:
“I could not stop reading this incredible true story.”
— Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club Pick)
“O’Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave this story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station…You may know the history, and you may think you know what’s coming, but don’t be so sure.”
— The Washington Post
“By imagining an alternative fate for Lucrezia that deviates from the historical record, the author crafts a captivating portrait of a woman attempting to free herself from a golden cage. Fans of the accomplished Hamnet won’t be disappointed by this formidable outing.”
— Publishers Weekly
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593320624
Interviews:
In BP Ávila:
- In the catalogue: click here.
- In eBiblio: click here.
Further reading:
- “Mi Última Duquesa” en Desorden Moral de Margaret Atwood: click here.
- “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning: click here.
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