When Lucrezia, the third daughter of the Duke of Florence, is wed to Alfonso d’Este, she’s not sure what to expect – but whatever it was, it was certainly not that he was going to want her dead before they’d been married a year.
I haven’t read Maggie O’Farrell’s work before, but she’s been on my radar after the success of Hamnet, and so when I saw The Marriage Portrait offered as a ‘lucky day’ loan from my library, I snapped it up. Hurrah for local libraries!
I already knew a bit of the murder rumors through the Browning poem “My Last Duchess,” but here the focus is on Lucrezia, not Alfonso. It is she who speaks to us, tells us of her childhood, her interests, her feelings of exclusion from her own family, and the slowly unraveling truth of her marriage. The writing is lush and evocative and laden with symbolism, the characters well-sketched and multi-facted, and I became invested in Lucrezia’s life and fate without even realizing it.
However, unlike some other reviewers I never felt like Lucrezia became fully realized – while we are in her head throughout, her thoughts and reactions felt deliberately flat sometimes. The ending too seemed a little too neat and contrived, glossing over what happened to a certain loyal character without a second mention. The more I thought about it the more I realized that the second half of the book reminded me very much of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” in both themes and plot points, and while I enjoyed this book, I still prefer Carter.
