The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell on September 6, 2022
Genres: Fiction / Historical / Renaissance, Fiction / Literary, Fiction / Women
Pages: 352
Format: Audiobook
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The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell is a beautifully written novel and I can see it is a lyrical masterpiece, but I just didn’t connect with it. Maggie O’Farrell is hit or miss with me. This is a case of wrong book, wrong time.
“The Marriage Portrait” drops us into the panicked mind of a teenage girl who knew her husband was plotting to kill her. In a few months, she’d be dead. It gives this away right away.
Previously O’Farrell had written Hamnet, which was 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” featured Lucrezia, the daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Like Hamnet, Lucrezia had 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.”
Lucrezia was born into an important 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 took place. So Lucrezia was forced to take her place. At the age of 16, before celebrating her first wedding anniversary, she ended up resigned to the fate she knew was coming.
Despite the quality of the writing and the depth of the characters, I found that this book wasn’t the right fit for me at this time. The slow pacing of the story made it difficult for me to fully engage with the characters and their struggles. However, I do believe that this book would be a great fit for readers who are in a different place in their lives, and who may be more receptive to the novel’s poignant themes.