Books: “The Marriage Portrait” by Maggie O’Farrell
Novelist Maggie O’Farrell seems to have been plucked from another century and placed intact within our own. In “Hamnet” (2020), she created a convincing (and entirely fictional) tale about Shakespeare’s son who died in 1596. In her latest novel, “The Marriage Portrait,” her protagonist is Lucretia, the fifth-oldest child of Cosimo de Medici’s 10 children.
The 1570s were a tough time to be a woman of noble birth. You were raised to do needlework, marry a duke from a far-off land and produce an heir, preferably male. All of which the feisty, artistically inclined Lucretia was disinclined to do.
The book is a delish portrait of court life in post-Renaissance Tuscany and Ferrara—the palace intrigue, the rivalries between ladies-in-waitings, and on a grander scale, the battles between nation states.
The Duke insists on having Lucretia’s portrait painted to celebrate his power. But what’s really going on is another unspoken war—between the Duke and Lucretia, the savvy, 15-year-old Duchess who suspects his intention is to use her a vessel to produce an heir—and to murder her if she doesn’t.
Fans of Maggie O’Farrell or Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca” will blaze though this novel post haste. Fans of similarly themed, bodice-ripping novels, the kind that are found mostly in airport bookshops, should read elsewhere.