In her ninth novel, The Marriage Portrait, British writer Maggie O’Farrell engages with the enduring speculation that Lucrezia de’ Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo de’ Medici, was murdered in 1561 by her husband Alfonso II D’Este, the duke of Ferrara.

Such speculation has been amply assisted by Robert Browning’s 1842 dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’, which spins a tale of courtly intrigue from the perspective of a duke who brags about his dead wife: ‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive.’ Later in his monologue, the duke recalls the words of the painter, who told him: ‘Paint / Must never hope to reproduce the faint / Half-flush that dies along her throat.’ It falls to O’Farrell to break the enduring silence surrounding Lucrezia’s story.

O’Farrell’s previous novel, Hamnet, which won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, garnered her a legion of new readers and numerous comparisons to Hilary Mantel. While her meticulous eye for historical detail is also evident in The Marriage Portrait, the subject matter also allows O’Farrell to exploit her long-standing fascination with the gothic. Not only does this recapture the sense of haunting that pervaded her earlier novels, but
it also situates her more clearly alongside her literary influences, who include Charlotte Brontë, Daphne du Maurier, and Angela Carter.