REVIEWS
Lucrezia, the resistant bride of a devious killer
Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, is so deliciously good that I gobbled it rapidly down, like a toddler face-planting into a long-awaited birthday cake. But this is a story to be savoured. In the same vein as her widely lauded Hamnet, this historical fiction imagines the experiences of Lucrezia de’ Medici, the Italian noblewoman alluded to in Robert Browning’s famous poem My Last Duchess. According to the historical note prefacing the book, in 1561, a 16-year-old Lucrezia died within a year of entering the court of her husband, the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II d’Este, a man almost twice her age. What follows is a narrative that teases our anticipation of Lucrezia’s murder by her husband, the beastly duke.
The chapters move non-linearly through her history – slipping memorably between the afternoon of her conception, childhood and charged scenes from her married existence. With characteristic warmth, O’Farrell transports readers into the inner sanctums of the rich and their servants in Renaissance Italy.
