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Coercive relationships are central to Maggie O'Farrell's latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, the fictional account of a forced marriage in 1560—that of fifteen-year-old Lucrezia de Medici to twenty-seven-year-old Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. O'Farrell began writing this tale as the UK's first Covid lockdown began, completing it two years later when life, more or less as we had known it pre-pandemic, was resuming. Curiously, her confinement during a time of plague mirrored her heroine's lack of physical freedom whilst growing up within the walls of her father's Florentine palazzo, and later during her brief marriage. In Renaissance Florence, major epidemics occurred repeatedly (Morrison, 1985).
For Lucrezia, however, it was not physical freedom alone that was lacking. In Renaissance Italy, marriages amongst the high-born were forged to secure power, wealth, and succession; women were commodities, the possessions of men, and their primary purpose was to produce sons and heirs for their husbands. Economically and politically, women were dependent on men.
In O'Farrell's account, following the unexpected death of her eldest sister, Maria, who had been Alfonso's intended bride, twelve-year-old Lucrezia learns that she is to be her sister's substitute. Three years later, against her will, she is passed from her father into Alfonso's control, clad in a wedding dress described as a cage. Protest is futile. Cosimo presses his signet ring “to the scalding circle of red”. The marriage contract is signed and sealed.
Preceding the novel's opening is an historical note. We learn that less than one year after the couple married, Lucrezia was dead. Whilst the official cause was “putrid fever”, rumours circulated that Alfonso murdered her. From the gap separating these contradictory accounts, O'Farrell's novel is born; between the known and unknown lies imaginative possibility.
Robert Browning's poem My Last Duchess (1842) inspired O'Farrell to write her novel. O'Farrell picks up on