Duchess in danger

This follow-up to Hamnet mingles fact and poetic fantasy in a Renaissance fable of a girl forced too young into marriage 

- Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Here is a novel inspired by a poem describing a painting portraying a young woman who actually lived. Art and artifice are intrinsic to it. In Maggie O’Farrell ’s imagining of 16th-century Italian courtly life, manners make the man, clothes make the woman, and an image is more durable than a person.

In 1558, Lucrezia , daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara . A year after entering her husband’s court in 1560 , aged just 16, she died. Poison was suspected. Several portraits of Lucrezia survive. Nearly 300 years after her death, Robert Browning wrote My Last Duchess, a dramatic monologue in which Duke Alfonso displays a portrait of his late wife and allows the reader to deduce that – insanely jealous – he murdered her. O’Farrell has shuffled historical fact, portraiture and poetic fantasy as the basis for a piece of fiction in which a simple tale, of a girl forced too young into a dynastic marriage, is overlaid with elements from fairy tale and myth.