The Marriage Portrait: the Instant Sunday Times Bestseller, Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023

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Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. Short chapters recounting the events of the following hours alternate with much longer ones giving us the backstory from her childhood onwards. Her husband's moods are mercurial, and she finds he is not particularly kind and harbors a streak of cruelty. The descriptions do seem over-wrought at times and even Lucrezia's character comes off as inconsistent: tough and independent as a child, timid and almost insipid post-marriage.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell review – a dark The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell review – a dark

In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara.

So I hate to say that I found The Marriage Portrait a big disappointment, but it was a slog to read on many levels.

The Marriage Portrait: the Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

In contrast to Browning’s ever smiling victim, O’Farrell imagines a rebellious spirit less interested in matrimony than in painting the natural world around her. There is a virgin heroine whose floor-length red hair, modestly confined in a pearl-decorated net, hints at rebellious energy.

It was beautiful to read, and captured the historical setting, however as the story progressed it took away from some of the dramatic tension and mystery. Finally, she knows her life is in danger, and the only one who can help her is an assistant painter working on her marriage portrait. As she listens, the narrative gaze moves around the table – lighting on a spaniel lapping at a dish, a woman wearing stuffed songbirds as ornaments in her hair, a man lasciviously handling a bowl of fruit. In Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of 16th-century Italian courtly life, manners make the man, clothes make the woman, and an image is more durable than a person.

The Marriage Portrait: the breathtaking new novel from the No

She is sixteen years of age, and the marriage is an attempt by her parents, the Grand Duke and Duchess of Tuscany, to ally with Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. Finely written and vividly imagined, it is far from being simplistic, but there is an engaging simplicity to it that makes it feel not quite like a grown-up novel. Several grim scenes make clear the mortal consequences of any attempt to escape Alfonso’s clutches: Will Lucrezia take the risk?

Lucrezia herself feels that there is a beast within her that could one day “crawl out into the light, blinking, bristling, unfurling its filthy fists and opening its jagged red mouth”. This book provides the answers, and is also very good at keeping the menacing tone going throughout. These animals, like the fantastic creatures writhing through the “grotteschi” decorations of Italian Renaissance palaces, hint at the untamed impulses contained by courtly rituals and cumbersome dresses.

The Marriage Portrait: the Instant Sunday Times - WHSmith The Marriage Portrait: the Instant Sunday Times - WHSmith

Her novels include AFTER YOU'D GONE, MY LOVER'S LOVER, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX, THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize. When she meets Jacopo, an apprentice to the painter commissioned to create her portrait, she finds a soul mate who perhaps offers a way out of her imprisoning marriage. You have one destiny in life and when you fail to fulfil that destiny there have to be consequences. Now O’Farrell has shuffled historical fact, portraiture and poetic fantasy together and used them as the basis for a piece of fiction in which a simple tale, of a girl forced too young into a dynastic marriage, is overlaid and embellished with elements from fairytale and myth.The duchess in the tower … Lucrezia de' Medici, who died aged 16 in 1560, is the protagonist in The Marriage Portrait. In a surprise ending, which suggests O’Farrell doesn’t believe in it herself, she allows us to escape it. Before Hamnet, I might have heard of this author, but in the rush of everyday life paid her no particular mind.