The Marriage Portrait

Lucrezia de’ Medici was married at fifteen and dead within a year, officially of fever, and Browning’s poem long ago suggested otherwise. O’Farrell gives her an interior life: a wilful, watchful girl handed to a duke who needs an heir, painted for a portrait that will outlast her. The novel opens with Lucrezia certain she is about to be murdered and then works back, which makes the period detail feel like a closing trap.