The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

 

Lucrezia is twelve when she meets her future husband, Alfonso the duke of Ferrera in Italy.  He is engaged to her older sister.  Lucrezia is the third daughter of the family and has no thoughts of marriage.  She is unlike the rest of the females of her father's court.  Lucrezia has no interest in poems and embroidery; she longs for freedom and is an artist who admires wild animals as well as the exotic animals her father keeps in the castle.

But a royal female is meant to solidify alliances.  When her sister dies on the eve of her wedding, Alfonso and his family suggest that he marry Lucrezia instead.  He is twice her age and twice her size.  She marries him having seen him only that once with no idea what marriage entails and no idea of what sex is.  

She soon finds out that her life will be very different.  Although Alfonso is a loving husband at first, he is adamant that he be obeyed in all ways.  Lucrezia is to speak when he allows, to associate with who he chooses and to be available to him whenever he wants.  His two sisters are much older than Lucrezia and caught up in court intrigues.  She only trusts her maid, who is the daughter of Lucrezia's wet nurse when she was a baby and who she grew up with for several years.  

Alfonso commissions a marriage portrait of his beautiful bride.  He makes it clear that she is to sit for the portrait for hours if the artist and his apprentices need her to.  People are starting to talk about her and her continued lack of pregnancy.  As the marriage approaches a year, it is expected that she would be bearing an heir.  Alfonso knows about the rumors that none of the women he has bedded over the years have had a child and is determined to secure his inheritance and the future of his name.  When Lucrezia continues to not get pregnant, she starts to see a change in her husband and starts to fear that she will never leave the court alive.  

Maggie O'Farrell is one of my favorite authors and I eagerly await her books and devour them.  She has an apt ability to create characters the reader immediately bonds with and her exhaustive research insures that the reader is caught up in the time and place of the story.  This book brings home the horror of being basically a small child expected to give herself over and over to a man who is twice her size and who can do whatever he pleases.  Her horror as she realizes the precariousness of her position and even of her life is drawn exquisitely.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.