Evening Book Club: Book Club
Contact Information
For more information regarding the Evening Book Club, please contact: Jaclyn Gomez at jgomez@rcls.org
Meeting Schedule
Next Meeting:
June 26, 2023 at 7pm
Discussion Questions
Discussion Questions
1. From the start, Lucrezia’s temperament is difficult for her mother to tolerate. Are Lucrezia’s intellect and willfulness a liability or a benefit in shaping the course of her life?
2. What distinctions did you notice between the way girls and boys were raised in Cosimo’s household? To what extent are Lucrezia and her siblings permitted to experience childhood innocence?
3. As you read the story of the tigress, what parallels did you see between the entrapment of trophy animals and the Duke’s quest to preserve and expand his dynasty?
4. Discuss the novel’s portrayals of motherhood. How do Eleanora, Sofia and Emilia’s mother (a cook and wet nurse) provide varied forms of sustenance to Lucrezia at key points in her life? Ultimately, who makes up her true family?
5. Did you trust Alfonso’s initial kindness toward Lucrezia? Is there any room for genuine love in Alfonso’s business of building empires?
6. In the novel, what is the role of artists? What is significant about Lucrezia’s ability to capture the imagery around her, and the imagery of her mind? How does her artistry compare to that of Il Bastianino and Jacopo, who are at the mercy of their clients? Who are the modern-day equivalents of these celebrity portraitists?
7. How does Lucrezia cope with her duty to serve as a replacement for Maria? As Lucrezia’s body matures and transforms, how is she affected by her sister’s legacy of womanhood, and by the connection between a woman’s value and her ability to sustain a pregnancy?
8. Are there many similarities between Lucrezia’s parents’ marriage and her marriage to Alfonso? As Eleanora writes to her daughter with advice for establishing power within her new family, what does she fail to understand about the fundamental differences between her daughter’s situation and her own?
9. Discuss the political fallout caused by Alfonso’s mother and her history of Protestantism. What was it like to read about a society in which religion was interwoven with military might and the wealth of the ruling families?
10. How did your impressions of Elisabetta and Nunciata shift as you learned more about them? How would you have fared as their sister-in-law?
11. As the Duke’s closest companion, Leonello is loyal at all costs. Does Lucrezia have a similar ally in Emilia?
12. Read Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess,” quoted in the novel’s epigraph, and revisit Maggie O’Farrell’s note at the end of her novel. What makes the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara such intriguing subjects for creative interpretation? What are your theories about what caused the death of the real Lucrezia? How did you react to O’Farrell’s reimagining of her fate?
13. O’Farrell has been widely praised for crafting poignant, perceptive depictions of life’s unexpected turns. How does THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT amplify aspects of the human experience portrayed in her other novels that you have read?
Source: https://wroteabook.org/book-club-questions-for-the-marriage-portrait-by-maggie-ofarrell/
Book Summary
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell
Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.
Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?
As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.
An interview with the author
An Interview with the Author
Book Reviews
Reviews of our current book.
Click on the links to read the full review!
- New York Journal of BooksMaggie O’Farell wastes no time in her new historical book, this one about two Italian Renaissance families joining their fortunes through marriage. The bride is Lucrezia de’ Medici, daughter of the powerful Cosimo de’ Medici. The groom is Alfonso, duke of Ferrara. Lucrezia, Cosimo, and Alfonso all actually existed as did the marriage described here.
But the book doesn’t open with the celebratory wedding, nor even with the many negotiations at court that had to be finalized first. Instead, O’Farrell picks the most dramatic moment possible, giving a first paragraph that immediately plunges the reader into Lucrezia’s life—or rather into her death... - Oprah DailyThe Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell’s glittering, propulsive new novel, could have been titled The Beautiful and Damned (with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald). Set in late-Renaissance Italy, amid the opulence and intrigue of dynastic politics, the book limns the brief life and mysterious death of the aristocratic Lucrezia de’ Medici (1545-1561), third daughter and fifth child of Cosimo, the vigorous, Machiavellian Duke of Florence, and his brilliant Spanish wife, Eleonora. Less than a century after the court of Lorenzo “Il Magnifico” de’ Medici dazzled Tuscany, with its artists and philosophers, and its embarrassment of riches, the family’s prominence has ebbed, necessitating an infusion of wealth and dynamism. Lucrezia, aged 13, is married off to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, a decade older, fulfilling her father’s wish for an alliance between the two city-states. (Her older sister, Maria, had been promised to Alfonso but died of an infection just after her betrothal.) This barter—a young woman’s future for social prestige—fuels O’Farrell’s tale of yearning and betrayal...
- Washington IndependentI clearly remember the ninth grade English class in which our teacher read to us Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” and the creeping chill of understanding that shivered through me as he did. It was a lasting lesson that sometimes “happily ever after” isn’t especially happy or even very long.
Author Maggie O’Farrell notes that the protagonist of her latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, is widely believed to be the ill-fated duchess of Browning’s poem. As we’re told on the book’s cover, Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici was married in 1560 at the age of 15 to Alfonso II d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. “Less than a year later,” the copy intones, “she was dead.”
This presents a bit of a pickle from a narrative perspective. O’Farrell has once again, as she so wondrously did in Hamnet, taken a little-known historical figure and imagined the world from her perspective...
The Author's Website
The author's website.
- Maggie O'FarrellFor information on the author: back ground information, awards, bibliography, etc.