How Maggie O'Farrell is shining a light on the hidden Renaissance past

"The best book you’re going to write is the one you can’t not write – the one that’s shouting loudest in your ear."

Maggie O'Farrell: listed by Google as British, but very much identifies as Irish

Maggie O’Farrell is stuck in Edinburgh Festival traffic. Living there for the past 12 years, she says festival jams are part of the city’s summer life. She’s rushing home to tell me about her new book, The Marriage Portrait, a rich compelling historical novel, set in Renaissance Italy, which imagines the life of a lesser known Medici, a teenage girl called Lucrezia. This follows her hugely successful, award-winning novel, Hamnet, published in 2020, featuring another lesser known family member, Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who died of plague aged 11.

Lucrezia de’Medici was a real person. The daughter of the Duke of Florence and Tuscany, she was married aged 15 to the Duke of Ferrera, before dying a year later in suspicious circumstances – it is thought that her husband poisoned her. Uxoricide amid the ruling classes was not uncommon. There is only one known portrait of Lucrezia, hanging at the Uffizi in Florence – she is believed to be the subject of the Robert Browning poem, My Last Duchess.