Houston Chronicle Sunday

Renaissanc­e page-turner

‘The Marriage Portrait’ brings a murdered duchess back to life

- CORRESPOND­ENT By Chris Vognar Chris Vognar is a Houston writer.

Robert Browning’s 1842 poem “My Last Duchess” is a mini marvel of literature, a perfectly calibrated dramatic monologue with a dark undertone: The speaker is a duke who pulls back a curtain to reveal a portrait of his former wife, whom, we gradually realize, he has murdered. He explains all of this to an emissary from his potential next wife, suggesting his anxiety over the matter is nil.

Maggie O’Farrell, the Northern Irish novelist whose 2020 novel “Hamnet” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, had always loved the poem. One day, just before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, she decided to find out if it was based in reality. What she discovered would lead her to her new novel, “The Marriage Portrait,” a Renaissanc­e page-turner that brings the duchess back to life.

O’Farrell will read from and discuss the novel Oct. 10 at the University of Houston as part of the Inprint author series.

“She’s dead, but also she’s behind that curtain, and he controls who sees her in the poem,” O’Farrell says from her home in Edinburgh. “I thought it was time to pull back that curtain and lead her out and say, ‘OK, it’s your turn to speak now. What’s the story? What story do you have to tell us?’”

The real-life duchess was Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence, married to Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, at age 15 in 1560.

The duchess died less than a year later; the cause given was “putrid fever,” or typhus. But the rumors of murder began almost immediatel­y.

We know little detail of Lucrezia’s existence. What O’Farrell has done is give her an interior life: shy but strong-willed, compassion­ate but fiercely determined, a gifted painter and lover of animals and underdogs. She’s the runt of the litter in her own family, chosen to marry Alfonso only when her older sister dies. As her husband imposes his will on the portrait painter, she makes friends with the artist’s apprentice­s. She’s also quite intuitive and certain that her death is close at hand, largely because her husband is unable to sire a child (a circumstan­ce, which, naturally, he blames on his wife).

There is in fact no known marriage portrait; the painting of Lucrezia that survives was commission­ed by her parents before her nuptials.

That, along with Browning’s poem, was enough to capture O’Farrell’s imaginatio­n. She recalls the day she waited for the portrait to download on her “rubbish phone.”

“This headdress and then her forehead, and then these eyebrows and gradually her face appeared,” she says. “As soon as I saw it, I just knew that I had my next book, that I wanted to tell the side of the story that I imagined she might tell if she was able to.”

It’s a marvel of a novel, propulsive in narrative and acutely attentive to minute detail. Lucrezia is blessed with the eye of a painter and, thanks to O’Farrell, a poet. Here she is on her long-dreaded wedding day: “A long triangle of light, an exact yellow replica of the window behind it, makes a sudden appearance at her feet, spreading itself out across the floor, as if reaching for her ankle. Lucrezia observes how it bends around objects in its path, drapes over a pair of shoes, a dropped cloth, a discarded shift.”

Through her novel, O’Farrell grants Lucrezia a spirit that transcends her fate in an arranged marriage, in a time and place when women of a certain social and political standing were but convenient tools to extend their families’ dynastic power.

O’Farrell was determined to push beyond the exterior image and arrive at a greater truth.

“Those Renaissanc­e portraits are so perfect,” the author says. “Their surfaces are so flawless, and their expression­s are often very neutral. I just always got the sense that behind the very polished veneer of these portraits are other lives and an immense psychologi­cal depth.”

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 ?? Murdo Macleod ?? Author Maggie O’Farrell says a Robert Browning poem inspired her to write “The Marriage Portrait.”
Murdo Macleod Author Maggie O’Farrell says a Robert Browning poem inspired her to write “The Marriage Portrait.”

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