A review by sarahmatthews
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

Read on audio

Narrator: Genevieve Gaunt

Pub. 2022, Tinder Press, 448 pp

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I was a little nervous about this one as I don’t often choose to read books set before 1900. However, this is Maggie O’Farrel and her storytelling is just wonderful so she soon had me won over, like she did with Hamnet.

The main character, Lucrezia, is a 16 year old girl who’s married off to Alfonzo in a contract between her father and a Duke from another part of Italy in the 1500s. Lucrezia’s strong willed and not what Alfonzo was expecting. O’Farrell has taken the bones of a moment in history in which Lucrezia is known to have died within a year of her wedding and brought it to life, imagining what it would’ve been like for such a young bride in this era. 

I particularly liked the details of the Renaissance court; the food, clothing and customs. plus Lucrezia’s relationships with her nurse Sophia and maid Emelia. And there are evocative descriptions of landscape, showing how Lucrezia responds to nature, noticing changes in her environment very acutely as she’s a talented painter.

“Lucrezia swivels away, towards the window where she can see, in the slice of sky above the villa’s roofs, a gathering of dark anvil shaped clouds. The weather breaks that night, cracking open, the heavens unleashing a storm Lucrezia watches at her chamber window as the mountains appear through the darkness, illuminated by a flash of lightning then vanish, appear, then vanish, a series of rocky peaks made visible by a flickering celestial torch flame.”

There’s a creeping sense of doom which is built expertly. I was really rooting for the characters even though we know from the very first page that the story will not end well. It’s a case of ‘how’ not ‘if’ tragedy will strike and she kept me enthralled and curious. But honestly, I wasn’t entirely on board with the ending.

Spoiler Alert: So, I was really invested in the story of Lucrezia and was expecting the tension that was building to have a fittingly gothic, dark conclusion but this is not where Maggie O’Farrell chose to take things. To me, the portrait of the title could have been used to have the last word, to haunt Alfonzo after her death or something but no, instead the final section felt rather rushed, with Lucrezia’s maid implausibly being strangled in her place and Lucrezia getting away to live her life as an anonymous painter without giving a second thought to Emelia who had been like a sister to her. I was not convinced by it. Perhaps it made for a less depressing ending for some readers but, for me, it felt like maybe the author bowed to pressure to have a ‘happy’ ending for commercial reasons

An engrossing novel, full of vivid, poetic writing.