The Marriage Portrait

[BaconAndAvocado]

Please can someone tell me what happens. I'm about 2/3 through and have other things to read!

I enjoyed what I read but nowhere near as much as Hamnet.

Tia

It’s been a while but SPOILER ALERT

The husband somehow ends up killing the maid (I think) thinking it’s his wife and the wife escapes.

I'm nearly finished with it, but it's been a slog. I haven't enjoyed it, and some of the prose sounds like a mickey-take. Weirdly I kept picturing French & Saunders playing all the parts and I think that ruined it

Definitely not as good as some of her other stuff.

Yes, it basically ends ( Spoiler!!) with her getting away and the maid dying instead. I thought it was an entertaining enough read but pretty unconvincing overall.

Thanks all.
Oh! I thought she’d be murdered by her husband.
I think the real life duchess died very young.

The duchess gets away and joins the painters and seems happy. Maid murdered in Duchess bed.
I hated it. Thought it was really badly written.
Contraversial I know, given the author

I agree with you.

Very disappointed with this. It so badly needed an editor. And even then may not have been successfully rescued.

I really loved the writing! Though I think the duchess should have died at the end.

It worked really well as an audio book.

I love Maggie O'Farrell books but agree that the ending of this one was implausible.
Also the whole book needed better editing. It seems to be as writers become established and successful, the editors step back (citing Barbara Kingsolver as a good example of this).

Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) is another prime example of this!

I love the Strike books but if they get any longer I'm going to have to start weight lifting 😀

I agree, love her other books and did not enjoy this one so much.

I borrowed this from a friend because of Hamnet, but once I was about halfway through I more or less forgot about it. I only finished it because the friend was coming over soon and I wanted to be able to give it back & discuss it.

We agreed that neither of us was really gripped. I thought Lucrezia was a bit too perfect & unrealistic from the start & never really cared enough about what happened to her.

Oh God, what a brilliant idea.

Do a set with The Ink Black Heart in one hand & The Running Grave in the other, & read a chapter during each rest

I haven't read the book but that ending sounds similar to the real life Lord Lucan murder of their nanny (and attempted murder of his wife)

How interesting - I actually preferred this to Hamnet and rekindled my love of her writing. I found it incredibly moving and loved the ambiguity of the ending (did she really escape).

But yes OP, her husband and his (vile) friend poison and then attempt to murder her, but they kill her poor maid by mistake (who is never considered as the victim because nobody knew she had arrived). She escapes from her room as her murderers are coming to find her (leaving her maid) and gets out of the estate following instructions given to her by the painter's assistant.

The writing at the end is rather ambiguous but the positive take is that the two escape together and she becomes a mysterious artist who becomes popular for her skillful miniature paintings, each of which allegedly has a hidden image beneath it.

I don’t mind the writing but i wasn’t convinced about Lucretia either, the whole thing didn’t resonate or feel authentic. I didn’t like the constant foreshadowing of doom either, even if there is a bit of an unlikely twist.

I read Zadie Smith’s the fraud before it and although that story lacks something too, she does evoke the era so well you feel as though you are there.

I have loved all off MoF's books, she is one of my favourite writers but thought this book was terrible. It was so long, not a huge amount happened and MoF seemed to be back doing her A level English adding a huge amount of unnecessary and over descriptive wording. Such a shame.

I've just finished and really enjoyed her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am.

I chose it for book group but there's not a huge amount to discuss!

I think the Marriage Portrait works best if you are very familiar with My Last Duchess poem by Robert Browning. It has been taught a lot for GCSE and A Level in England for many years. I know it inside out against my will from having to teach it many times, not from being a poetry expert! There are loads of details from the poem in the book which are fun to spot E.g. the white mule/ pony incident.

The ending of the novel is great to me because the whole poem is about the horror of the innocent young Lucretia getting slaughtered by abusive old husband but in the novel it's a surprise ending that she escapes. Horrible for the maid though. I think it's a novel for a niche market of English teachers, to an extent!

@MonkeyTennis34 I Am, I Am, I Am is so good

Oh wow I loved this book!! Thought it was one of the best I read last year (and I read a lot!)
I also won't hear a word said against JKR😂 as far as I'm concerned, the bigger, the better!
I couldn't read Hamnet though, the theme/plot? I couldn't handle

As an aside, the Earth's Children series is the most poorly edited series I've ever read. They started off brilliantly, then each subsequent book recapped the previous ones to such an extent that the final book, if properly edited and if they removed the tedious multi-page descriptions of caves, would have been a novella. Which I would have preferred