Maggie O'Farrell Shares the Five Books That Inspired The Marriage Portrait
By Headline Books
Maggie O'Farrell Shares the Five Books That Inspired The Marriage Portrait
By Headline Books
'I’m so honoured that Bookshop.org has chosen The Marriage Portrait as its book of the month. I wrote this novel during the pandemic, when my previous novel, Hamnet, was published. I could not be more grateful for the extraordinary support of independent booksellers, and the ever more inventive ways they devised to get books into readers’ hands.'
Maggie O' Farrell, November 2022
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
£10.99 £10.44One of my favourite historical novels – or, indeed, novels – of all time. This 1969 postmodern classic both adheres to and throws down a challenge to conventions of Victorian literature. Fowles noted to himself, while writing it: "You are not trying to write something one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write; but perhaps something one of them failed to write.” He had had the images of a woman standing at the end of a quay, looking out to sea, deciding she was a disgraced 19th-century former governess, and the unforgettable Sarah Woodruff came into being. She is feared and desired by Charles Smithson, a gentleman and amateur naturalist. There is also an omniscient narrator, who appears, disappears and reappears throughout the text, most famously to illuminate the novel’s multiple endings, of which there are no fewer than three
The Leopard: Vintage Quarterbound Classics
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
£9.99 £9.49Depicting a time of upheaval and unification in Italian history, this irresistable novel is about a Sicilian nobleman caught between the desire to uphold the values of his class but also adapt to survive. Prince Fabrizio is a man in a changing world: his wife adheres too strongly to her faith; Garibaldi’s troops are landing on the shores of Sicily; peasants have the nerve to accrue wealth comparable to his own; his beloved nephew is joining the Risorgimento cause. I am always amused by what Lampedusa wrote of this book in a letter to a friend: "Be careful: the dog ... is a very important character and is almost the key to the novel.” So, keep your eye on Bendico the hound
My Cousin Rachel
Daphne Du Maurier
£9.99Du Maurier is best known – and rightly so – for her masterpiece, Rebecca. My Cousin Rachel, for me, comes a very close second. Du Maurier is mistress of the sleight of hand in fiction: she will unseat your expectation again and again in this novel, pulling the rug out from under your feet. Rachel, as the novel opens, is possibly a murderess, of the beloved guardian of the narrator, Philip. We are, through his eyes, instructed to loathe and distrust her. Then, by degrees, Philip comes to adore Rachel. But is he right to believe this woman could never have killed anyone or is he, too, being taken in by her guile? Brilliantly, marvellously chilling
The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio
£12.99 £12.34Seven young women and three young men flee an outbreak of the Black Death in 14th-century Florence, retreating to a villa in the countryside. There, to pass the time and alleviate the boredom of lockdown (can anyone else relate?), they decide to tell each other stories. The result is a collection of tales, originally written in the Florentine vernacular, told by Boccaccio’s possibly fictional ten narrators. Its fascinatingly familiar scenario and enormous literary influence aside, The Decameron gives us stories of love, friendship, practical jokes, sex, and more. It describes a world a hundred years or so before the characters in The Marriage Portrait were born but I found it so invaluable in imagining Renaissance Florence that I had to use an excerpt for the epigraph
Selected Poems
Robert Browning
£10.99 £10.44Borrowing a medium from the theatre, Browning makes the soliloquy entirely his own in his dramatic monologues. His narrators, always distinct from the poet himself, are artists, murderers, bishops, painters, dukes. Within the bounds of Browning’s astonishingly tight verse, they reveal the often shocking particulars of their lives, addressing us with a frank account of themselves, creating an intimacy with us that can be prickling and uncomfortable. The most famous – and widely studied – is of course ‘My Last Duchess’, which was the starting point for my novel The Marriage Portrait, which imagines the story from the dead Duchess’s point of view