One of the first, if not the first, experiences I had of ‘close reading’ (which is a critical analysis of a text) was Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’. Blessed as I am with a wipe-clean memory, it’s striking how vividly I remember my teacher dissecting the poem line by line, word by word, as he revealed an as-yet-undiscovered and joyous way of reading. Partly for that I spoke about the poem in my University interview and it’s one of the only poems that I can quote by heart. Now Maggie O’Farrell has forged that poem into something fierce and fresh and distinctly O’Farrellian: ‘The Marriage Portrait’ is a haunting re-telling of the story behind Browning’s poem, and one that is painted so starkly in my mind that I am hopeful it too will elude the regular (involuntary) synaptic purging.

We begin in 1561 with Lucrezia and her husband Alfonso (the Duke of Ferrara) as they sit down to supper and Lucrezia realises with “complete certainty” that the Duke her husband “intends to kill her”. From that “wild and lonely place” we are plucked and thrust into the oppressive heat of Florence in 1544 and Lucrezia’s conception. So the pendulum of the narrative is set in motion, and on we swing through time, between Lucrezia’s childhood - overlooked and undervalued, the black sheep of her family - to her first meeting with the Duke, her marriage and its swift decline. We end where we began, with Lucrezia confronted by the murderous intent of her husband.

The prospect of Lucrezia’s murder in the novel’s very first paragraph establishes the sense of menace which seeps throughout the text. This “presence, malign and predatory” is linked inextricably with Lucrezia’s increasing disassociation from herself. Starkly, this disconnection begins on her wedding day: with each layer of marital dress heaped upon her, Lucrezia becomes increasingly passive. Eventually “the dress is on her”; it is the dress that wears her, and its excessive activity (it “rustles.. slides… speaks…scuffs…chaffs…hooks…nibbles…creaks”) highlights Lucrezia’s new state of confinement - she cannot even lift her hands to cover her ears.

The more Lucrezia looks like the Duke’s Duchess, the less she recognises herself: in the mirror on her wedding day she sees “a girl surrounded by a sea of blue and gold” and later the mirror shows a married Lucrezia “not Lucrezia, but someone other”. And yet there is a force in Lucrezia that cannot be snuffed out. The Duke identifies “something at the core of her, a type of defiance”. We see it in her as she creates her secret underpaintings and then hides them under another layer of paint. Like those hidden paintings, Lucrezia’s true self is not erased by the ducal trappings heaped upon her, it is merely covered up. Ultimately, she must cast off those trappings entirely to escape the Duke disguised as her maid.

Throughout, there are nods towards ‘My Last Duchess’: both symbolic - the white mule the Duke gives to Lucrezia recalls the white mule ridden by Browning’s Duchess, and linguistic - the pandering painter, Il Bastiano who could never “find the paint to reproduce the flush along her throat” echos Browning’s similarly sycophantic Fra Pandolf’s words: “Paint/Must never hope to reproduce the faint/Half-flush that dies along her throat”. These allusory overtones serve to add to our sense of dread for Lucrezia - ominously, the Duke’s “first” duchess - who we fear will meet the same end as Browning’s “last” Duchess. In this, Maggie mimics her heroine: like Lucrezia’s paintings, her ‘Marriage Portrait’ is layered and ultimately she usurps Browning’s narrative by saving the Duchess and letting Lucrezia tell her own story.