Maggie O’Farrell stole (and broke) hearts with her last novel, Hamnet, a searing portrait of the death of William Shakespeare’s son, and the grief that cleaves the family in two. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and established O’Farrell as a novelist with a preternatural deftness when it comes to historical fiction.
An echo of O’Farrell’s last subject runs like pigment through her latest, as her tale of power, family, duty and betrayal brings to mind Shakespeare’s Macbeth and his "borrowed robes".
The Marriage Portrait illuminates the imagined inner life of Lucrezia, the third daughter of Cosimo I de ’Medici, the ruler of Renaissance Florence. Married off at 13 to Alonso, Duke of Ferrara – the former fiancé of her older sister Maria, who died suddenly before the marriage – Lucrezia died just a year into the union, at 16, from tuberculosis, though historians have speculated that she may have been poisoned by her husband.
Throughout this slow-burning, menacing and lush novel, the young duchess is weighed down by her own proverbial borrowed robes – not only of her sister, but of being a duchess in general.
O’Farrell paints an arresting portrait of Lucrezia as an anomaly, an untamed challenge to the aristocratic system that produced her. The author taps into the pervasive superstitions of the era: Eleanora, Lucrezia’s mother, comes to blame her daughter’s rebellious spirit on having gazed at maps filled with "dragons and monsters" while in the act of conceiving her, believing that a mother’s thoughts in that moment impacts a child’s persona.
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Listen: Maggie O'Farrell talks The Marriage Portrait to RTÉ Arena
An early hint at her nature comes when Lucrezia glimpses of a caged tigress in her father’s menagerie, with which she immediately bonds. This creature, possessing what Lucrezia calls "the distillation of life", quickly becomes a clear metaphor for the caged Duchess.
Her position in the family is further emphasised on the day of her wedding, when she tries to forge a connection with mother on way to the ceremony, desperate to unfurl the knots between them. The effort only stresses how much of an "afterthought" she feels she was.
It’s a stifling and dizzying setting. Adding to this, O’Farrell reminds the reader again and again of the duchess’s youth, such as on the trek to her new home in Ferrara when she grips the hand of her lady-in-waiting Emilia, worrying about "monsters" lurking in the darkness.
The monster in this story, however, is immediately revealed in the first passage, as Lucrezia realises her husband plots to murder her for not producing a male heir. Thus, the novel becomes a slow and haunting creep towards that inevitability, punctuated by vignettes from the duchess’s strained childhood and vibrant inner life.
Lurking on the periphery is the spectre of the marriage portrait itself. It’s a nod to the novel’s inspiration, Robert Browning’s poem My Last Duchess in which Alonso wryly reflects on a portrait of Lucrezia, "looking as if she were alive".
Much of what will have drawn readers to O’Farrell thrives in this novel: the fullness of her world-building, which plumbs the corners of images and creates tangible space through words; the inventive and often whimsical metaphors, in which the night sky is "a black bowl upturned over your head". Her sentences flow like music notes, as Lucrezia’s stiff silk and gold threaded wedding dress is compared to the rigging of a ship, or creating a "glossolalia all of its own".
The novel somewhat loses steam, however, in its breadth and timidity in reaching to the depths of human experience that O’Farrell achieved in Hamnet.
The tigress metaphor is expended quickly, as Lucrezia becomes aware of her beast-like and feline "spirit" that refuses to yield to expectations. She later pictures it as an entity that could "crawl out into the light, blinking, bristling, unfurling its filthy fists and opening its jagged red mouth".
The reader rarely gets to see this beast. Yes, we get glimpses of her resilience and fortitude – refusing to flee home to Florence, for example – but they often fall short of expectation, such as the young Duchess confronting the overwhelming fear and uncertainty of her new bedchamber in Ferrara with a trite, "Take that, darkness".
Ultimately, the novel stops short of showing us the brutality of the life Lucrezia may have lived. She is surrounded by horror, from the opening passage that reveals her knowledge that she will be murdered to the screams that bleed from Alonso’s chambers and echo through the fortress one night.
The worst, and arguably truest, welts to Lucrezia’s spirit are either played off-stage – like the eventual killing of her enchanted tigress – or are kept at arm’s length, such as the death of Maria that is breezed over in a rush to get to the marriage part.
As well as this, once Lucrezia becomes aware of her husband’s plot, she does little to subvert or avoid it, instead spinning out in circles of panic. Action is largely superseded by Lucrezia’s own inner monologue, whether she’s questioning how to behave in a new court, straining to glean some information from her husband or fuming against the expectations placed on her.
O’Farrell’s novel is a lush and evocative work, shedding light on an intriguing young woman and trying to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of her life and experience, thwarted in more ways than one by the patriarchal society that held her captive.
In an effort to paint an entire portrait, however, she may have neglected the devastating details of her subject.
The Marriage Portrait is published by Tinder Press
