The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell is a fictionalised account of the marriage of 15-year-old Lucrezia di Cosima de’Medici to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrera in sixteenth century Florence, merging two powerful family dynasties. Lucrezia would be dead barely a year later, allegedly of “putrid fever” but rumours persist that she was murdered, as per the Duke’s confession in Robert Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’. O’Farrell’s novel imagines events from Lucrezia’s point of view as a young adolescent in an arranged marriage to an older man with the sole purpose of producing a male heir. Renaissance Italy isn’t an period of history I knew a great deal about, but it is very much brought to life by O’Farrell’s vivid descriptions and the suspense caused by Lucrezia’s growing realisation that her husband is plotting to kill her when she fails to fall pregnant. Historical fiction is a relatively new direction for O’Farrell following Hamnet in 2020 and her latest novel does not disappoint. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Isabel Hardman
Books I Read in August 2023
Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman
With Parliament still in the grip of deadlock over Brexit, a book with the title ‘Why We Get the Wrong Politicians’ might sound particularly timely. However, even Isabel Hardman admits that the provocative title is slightly misleading. Rather than a populist takedown of lazy and self-serving MPs, her examination of the political class is more sympathetic, as she shows that it tends to be the structural flaws in the system which have caused so much political dysfunction in recent years. Continue reading
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