The Marriage Portrait: A Novel

Allusion, here, though, isn’t just about imitation. “My Last Duchess” records the quirks of Lucrezia’s character, but it’s nonetheless a portrait of Alfonso: the way he speaks and thinks, his vanity and cruelty, his need for control. The Marriage Portrait, by contrast, is Lucrezia’s novel: it makes reference to Browning’s narrative to signal difference, not similarity, to indicate the emergence of a new story in the costume of an old one…Lucrezia’s choicelessness is the novel’s crux. Under the influence of the poison she suspects Alfonso of administering, “she is a creature entirely at the mercy of a stronger power, a flea on the back of a rabid beast, a plucked quince in a pot of bubbling water.”

Review of The Marriage Portrait. by Clare Bucknell, London Review of Books, October 6th, 2022