The Marriage Portrait
the Instant Sunday Times Bestseller, Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023
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4.0 • 160 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023
A Reese's Bookclub December Pick (2022)
An Instant Sunday Times, New York Times and Irish Times Bestseller (August 2022)
A Guardian and LitHub Book of the Year (December 2022)
'Every bit as evocative and spellbinding as Hamnet. O'Farrell, thank God, just seems to be getting better and better' i newspaper
'Her narrative enchantment will wrest suspense and surprise out of a death foretold' Financial Times
'Ingenious, inventive, humane, wry, truthful . . . better than her last novel' Scotsman
'Finely written and vividly imagined' Guardian
'In O'Farrell's hands, historical detail comes alive' Spectator
Winter, 1561. Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, is taken on an unexpected visit to a country villa by her husband, Alfonso. As they sit down to dinner it occurs to Lucrezia that Alfonso has a sinister purpose in bringing her here. He intends to kill her.
Lucrezia is sixteen years old, and has led a sheltered life locked away inside Florence's grandest palazzo. Here, in this remote villa, she is entirely at the mercy of her increasingly erratic husband.
What is Lucrezia to do with this sudden knowledge? What chance does she have against Alfonso, ruler of a province, and a trained soldier? How can she ensure her survival.
The Marriage Portrait is an unforgettable reimagining of the life of a young woman whose proximity to power places her in mortal danger.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Northern Ireland-born, Edinburgh-based O’Farrell’s ninth novel is the beguilingly gripping, fact-based story of a doomed duchess. Set in 16th-century Italy, it follows teen bride Lucrezia, the misfit third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, ruler of Florence. Lucrezia finds herself forced into an arranged marriage with Spanish duke Alfonso as a substitute for her older sister, who dies shortly before their wedding. Life with the sinister, controlling Alfonso soon becomes a gilded cage. At a remote rural villa, she realises her husband plans to kill her. However, Lucrezia senses a kindred spirit in Jacopo, mute apprentice to the artist commissioned to paint her portrait. Can he help her survive and even escape? The Renaissance world of courtly intrigue and fairytale castles is creepily atmospheric. O’Farrell’s intimate third-person narrative, urgently written in the present tense, takes us deep inside Lucrezia’s mind as she recalls her eccentric childhood and imagines all manner of nocturnal horrors. Full of poetic imagery and richly descriptive prose, this is a haunting historical fable with a memorable heroine and Hitchcockian twist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lush, provocative historical from National Book Critics Circle Award winner O'Farrell (Hamnet) follows a young woman who is married off at 15 amid the complex world of 16th-century Italian city-states. O'Farrell bases her heroine, Lucrezia de' Medici, on a real-life figure depicted in Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess," who was murdered by her husband. When the reader first meets Lucrezia, she's been married for not quite a year and faces mortal danger in what O'Farrell describes as a "wild and lonely place." The narrative moves back and forth from the nearly deserted fortress where Lucrezia plays a game of cat and mouse with the duke of Ferrara, the husband who might be attempting to kill her, and the events that have brought her here. As a child of a noble family in Florence, she was untamable and passionate about making art. Now, the duke grows increasingly impatient with her as she fails to produce the heir he needs to secure his position. O'Farrell excels at sumptuous set pieces: Lucrezia's encounter with a tiger her father keeps in the basement beneath their palace, the wedding where she is draped and almost swallowed up by her gown, her meetings with the mysterious figures at her new home, particularly her enigmatic husband. 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.
Customer Reviews
Loved it!
Fantastic , highly recommend!
Better than Hamnet
4.5 stars
The author is British (Northern Irish, in fact). This is her 9th (I think) novel. She’s also published a best selling memoir. Her writing has received considerable critical praise and won a number of awards, most notably the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her last effort, Hamnet, a historical speculation about the origin of Shakespeare’s greatest play. (The bard had a son of that name who died of plague. The spellings Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable in the 16th century.)
The author takes us to the 16th century again. Tuscany this time. Florence rather than Stratford on Avon. The focus is Lucrezia, the fifth child, and third daughter, of Cosimo di Medici, the Duke of Florence, later Grand Duke of Tuscany.
The Medici family was bigger than big in Florence back in the day. Little Lucrezia’s great-great, or possibly great-great-great-grandaddy, was Lorenzo the Magnificent. Michelangelo and Botticelli would have been road kill without him. (Check them all out on Wikipedia)
Little Lucrezia (1545-1561) was married off by her father at 13 to the intended of her elder sister Maria, who had died in precipitate fashion after betrothal of an infectious illness that probably wasn’t plague but still nasty.
Our gal’s brief time (1558–1561) as Duchess of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio was not happy by all reports, including Ms O’Farrell’s fictionalisation. Officially, she died of tuberculosis. It was widely rumoured at the time that her husband poisoned her, or had her poisoned. Those rumours persisted. In 1842, the English poet Robert Browning wrote of them in verse in "My Last Duchess.”
Ms O’Farrell paints a wonderful picture of the time and place, the wealth and power, the rich and powerful acquaintances, the artists, and the role of women (hint: male heir required urgently). The prose is lush, and the ending suitably suspenseful.