Book Club Guide

The Marriage Portrait

by Maggie O'Farrell · 2022 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The young woman who knows too much to be safe
Art as the thing that outlives both the subject and the painter
Power, the body and the history that women cannot enter

About this book

Lucrezia de' Medici, married at fifteen to Alfonso II of Ferrara, becomes convinced that her husband is planning to kill her. O'Farrell's novel is based on the real woman who may have been the subject of Browning's 'My Last Duchess', and asks what it meant to be a young woman of extraordinary ability given in marriage to a powerful man who required her compliance.

Published in 2022, The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. O'Farrell researched extensively in Italian archives and spent time in Ferrara before writing the novel.

Discussion questions

Lucrezia knows — or fears — that her husband intends to kill her, and we know from Browning's poem that she died young. How does O'Farrell generate tension in a story whose ending is already known?
The novel alternates between the wedding journey to Ferrara and scenes from Lucrezia's childhood. How does O'Farrell use this structure to build Lucrezia as a character we understand before we see her threatened?
Lucrezia is a painter and a person of extreme sensory perception. How does O'Farrell use this artistic gift — as characterisation, or as something the novel's argument needs?
The novel is based on the historical Lucrezia de' Medici and Browning's dramatic monologue. How does O'Farrell negotiate between these sources — and what does historical fiction owe to the real person it reimagines?
O'Farrell won the Women's Prize for Hamnet and was shortlisted for The Marriage Portrait. What does each novel do that the other cannot — and what links them thematically?