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AUTHOR Maggie O’Farrell spent her lockdown writing about uxoricide — the killing of a wife. The Marriage Portrait, her latest atmospherically charged historical novel, is set in 16th-century Italy, within the dynastic marriage of Lucrezia de’ Medici and Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara.

Her protagonists are historical figures, but O’Farrell’s story is speculative. In 1560, 15-year-old Lucrezia left Florence to begin married life. Within a year she was dead; it has long been alleged she came to a sticky end. The Marriage Portrait begins several months after the honeymoon. Alfonso has brought Lucrezia to a remote hunting lodge: ‘it comes to her with a peculiar clarity . . . that he intends to kill her.’

For all the success of romantic fiction, it is unhappy marriages that arguably occupy the more vaunted place in literary history. The Western literary tradition begins with Homer’s Iliad. What sparked that ten-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans? Helen of Argos leaving her husband Menelaus to abscond to Troy with Paris.

The Women of Troy is the second instalment of novelist Pat Barker’s reimagination of The Iliad from a female perspective. In it, Troy has fallen and Menelaus has reclaimed his wife. But when the narrator Briseis visits Helen she sees ‘a necklace of circular bruises round her throat’. Briseis thinks: ‘Poor Helen. All that beauty — and she was really just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over’.

Others’ marriages can often seem unfathomable. One of 20th-century fiction’s most inscrutable unions is that of John le Carre’s great spycatcher George Smiley to serial adulterer Lady Ann Sercombe. She is dismissive of him and her affairs make him a laughing-stock. Yet he remains steadfast; she always returns. ‘I’m a comedian, George,’ she says in Smiley’s People. ‘I need a straight man. I need you.’

Many of literature’s greatest novels, like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and The Portrait of a Lady, revolve around characters in unhappy marriages.