Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait and the story of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess"

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive.

Maggie O'Farrell

So begins Robert Brownings poem about Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrata. 

She was just sixteen when she died, reportedly of putrid fever, just one year of she was married  and had been married for one year to Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrata. This true story was the inspiration for Maggie O'Farrell's latest novel. 

I loved her last novel Hamnet so much – you can find my short review here; https://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-womans-prize-longlist-is-ready-for.html – but after winning acclaim and prizes for this story about the death of Will Shakespeare's son, I approached the new book in some trepidation, because, honestly, how could any writer achieve something as good as that a second time round? Okay, O'Harrell has been writing for years, and was recently feted for her autobiography, I am, I am, but I've known novelists stymied after achieving their greatest book yet. Hamnet was sensitively and beautifully and robustly written, andO'Farrell addressed this hidden story of Shakespeare's life with originality and vigour

The Marriage Portrait is also a forgotten story, but thanks to  Robert Browning (and the dust jacket, of course), 'the reader begins the book already knowing the central character will die by the end of it. Even if they haven't reads poem, or the blurb, the first paragraph the first chapter makes this plain. Sixteen year old Lucrezia sits across the dining table from her husband, and sudden realises she is doomed.

…it comes to her with a peculiar clarity, as if some colour glass has been moved from in front her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her. 

Lucrezia has been taken by her husband to a remote hunting lodge. No maid, no friends, just the two of them together. Very soon the the great painter, Il Bastianino, and his apprentices, will arrive, bringing the finished marriage portrait with them. Lucrezia is a painter of immense skill herself, but of course, she is also a 16th Century duchess, and will never have her work hung, sold, or even much admired. She is just a girl, and her only job is to supply her husband with sons. What she doesn't know is that, after her death, two further wives will also be unable to do that job, just as she, after a year of marriage, has not  – Alfonso is unable to have children.

This book cleverly mixes fiction with fact. Yes, Lucrezia did die, supposedly of a fever, in 1661, and perhaps we would have forgotten her but for Browning's poem. Regal ladies did have a terrible habit of dying young, especially if they displeased their husbands; Lucrezia's sister Isabella died, perhaps of strangling, just days after her cousin, Dianora died mysteriously at a villa in the Italian countryside.

The book opens only days before the murder, but then moves back and forth in time, weaving the previous story. We see Lucrezia's conception, her birth, and her childhood as the third daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence. We watch her grow, into a girl with huge spirit, a lover of animals and a blossoming artist – her parents allowed her to take lessons from the same grand artists as her brothers. 

O'Farrell represents Lucrezia's life, both as a child, locked away inside Florence's grandest Palazzo, guarded by guards and maids-in-waiting, and her year as Olfonso's wife, at his court in Ferrata, where her freedoms are just as thwarted and dangerous politics swirl about, only half understood by the teenager.

You may find, if you look at some of the reviews of this book, that some readers have found it wanting. The Guardian's Johanna Thomas-Corr comments on the present tense, which can become a bit wearing, I agree, but also thinks the book is:

"not nearly as horribly gripping as it ought to be, partly as O’Farrell refuses to say in one image what she can do in three…too much hospitality is shown to Lucrezia’s dreams…the symbolism of men as hunters, women as prey soon becomes overwrought."

Luckily, I read the book before I read the review, or I might have never bought this
beautifully crafted hardback edition. I beg to differ; the prose is steady and magnificent, and any repetition feels naturally how Lucrezia might feel and think five hundred years ago. The screws of tension begin to turn as the portrait is painted; Lucrezia meets Jacopo, the mute apprentice to 

The only actual portrait of
Lucrezia, at the age of 13

Il Bastianino, and they quickly form a deep attachment. Steadily, a possible way of escape is build into the story – but, how can Lucrezia take it? In history, she dies, trapped at the hunting lodge. In the fiction…well, you'll have to read the story to find out.

 Not only is there fiction in this novel, though. Robert Browning's poem (you can find it here https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43768/my-last-duchess) only imagines a marriage portrait; in reality the only painting of Lucrezia was commissioned by her parents, when she was betrothed to Alfonso – with a dowry, it is said, of £50 million in today's currency.