Maggie O’Farrell
© Sophie Davidson

Worth 1,000 words

Maggie O’Farrell’s latest explores the life of a young duchess

by KIRSTI SHARRATT

Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, tells the story of a resilient young woman’s fight for her life, and although the circumstances were very different, O’Farrell herself almost died when she was a girl.

At 8 years old, she contracted encephalitis and was in intensive care for several months, where she spent nearly all her time listening to audiobooks and reading. “That’s when reading became a very important part of my life,” she recalls.

Alongside her love of reading, O’Farrell remembers always having an urge to write. “The doctors thought I wouldn’t walk again or be able to hold a pencil or write,” she says. However, she proved them wrong by getting back to school, where English was her favorite subject.

Her illness left her with a stutter, which she credits with giving her hypersensitivity to language and vocabulary. “Stammerers can think of about five synonyms for a particular word that they don’t want to say,” says O’Farrell, a Costco member who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. “You can’t underestimate what a relief writing is for a stammerer—the idea that the words can just flow from your pen nib makes writing an absolute joy.”

Today, O’Farrell is the author of a memoir, two children’s books and nine novels, including Hamnet, which won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Set in Italy in the Renaissance—a period O’Farrell describes as a dichotomy between beauty and brutality—The Marriage Portrait was inspired by the real-life duchess Lucrezia de’ Medici. Lucrezia was the subject of Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess,” which O’Farrell had studied at university. “It features a 16th-century duke showing a visitor a portrait and saying, ‘This is my previous wife. And by the way I murdered her.’ It’s an astonishing moment.”

O’Farrell later saw the portrait of Lucrezia de’ Medici by the Italian artist Bronzino. “As soon as I saw it, I just knew I had my next book,” O’Farrell says. “[Lucrezia] looks really worried; she looks as if she has something to say, and I wanted to tell her side of the story.”

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Kirsti Sharratt is a freelancer who lives in St Andrews, Scotland.

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