A Footnote to the Legend: Maggie O'Farrell Speaks for Forgotten Women

Reading 'Hamnet' and then 'The Marriage Portrait' back-to-back is a genuinely illuminating way into Maggie O'Farrell's whole project as a novelist, because once you've read them side by side, you realise she isn't really writing about Shakespeare or the Medicis at all. She's writing about the women history barely bothered to mention.

'Hamnet' (2020) takes its title from Shakespeare's son, who died of plague at eleven, and whose name would resurface, four years later, in a play about a grieving prince. But Shakespeare himself is barely named in the novel, he's simply "the Latin tutor," then "the husband," then "the father," always slightly offstage, always defined by his relation to someone else. The real centre of gravity is Agnes, his wife, history knows her as Anne Hathaway, but O'Farrell reclaims the name found in her father's will and reimagines her as a forager, healer, and quietly formidable outsider, entirely at odds with the folklore of the jilted older woman who trapped young Will into marriage.

'The Marriage Portrait' (2022) performs a strikingly similar act of resurrection two years later, this time on Lucrezia de' Medici, a real Renaissance duchess married off at fifteen to Alfonso II d'Este and dead within a year, likely poisoned. History left barely a paragraph on her. Robert Browning immortalised her, unnamed, as a silent, murdered wife in his poem "My Last Duchess." O'Farrell gives her back a name, a temperament, a whole interior world, and lets us watch her circle, with mounting dread, the exact fate we already know is coming.

That's the throughline, and it's a genuinely clever one: O'Farrell doesn't invent famous stories, she goes looking for the women standing just outside the frame of them, and drags them into focus. She's said as much herself, her rule is to take every scrap of biographical fact she can find and "embroider" a novel around it, staying evenhanded even where the historical record tempts a simpler verdict. It's a rigorous kind of imagination, closer to forensic reconstruction than costume drama.

Connect on Instagram

O'Farrell's own life reads like it primed her for exactly this kind of writing. Based in Edinburgh, she survived a serious childhood illness that nearly killed her, an experience she wrote about candidly in her memoir 'I Am, I Am, I Am', and that intimacy with mortality runs under both these novels like groundwater. She's spoken about the strange responsibility of writing real people: that you have to remember their bones are lying in a churchyard in Stratford, or a tomb in Ferrara, and write accordingly. You feel that weight on every page of both books.

Stylistically, they're recognisably siblings. O'Farrell writes in a dense, sensory, almost tactile prose, you don't just picture Agnes's forest or Lucrezia's menagerie, you can practically smell them. Natural imagery does enormous emotional work in both novels: bees, herbs, and the woods around Stratford in 'Hamnet'; a caged tiger, brought vividly and unsettlingly to life, prowling through 'The Marriage Portrait' as a clear stand-in for Lucrezia herself, trapped and magnificent and doomed. Both books also share her structural signature, non-linear timelines that circle their central tragedy rather than marching toward it, so that dread accumulates rather than arrives. In 'Hamnet' this produces one of the most devastating extended sequences in recent fiction, tracking the path of plague fleas from a Venetian glassblower's workshop all the way to a Warwickshire farmhouse, arriving with the same patient, terrible inevitability as Lucrezia's fate in the later book.

Where they diverge is tone and pacing. 'Hamnet' is elegiac and slow-burning, it's a grief ridden novel disguised as a domestic one, its power built cumulatively through accretion of small, devastating detail. 'The Marriage Portrait' is tauter and more overtly gothic, closer to a thriller in structure, with the reader locked into Lucrezia's mounting paranoia inside Alfonso's court in a way that feels almost claustrophobic by design. Read together, you can trace O'Farrell sharpening the same tools for a different genre: the empathy and sensory density remain constant, but the second book trades meditative grief for something closer to dread.

What both books ultimately share is their emotional argument: that being a footnote in someone else's legend is its own kind of tragedy, and that fiction, carefully, respectfully, imaginatively deployed, can do something history never bothered to. Read one after the other, 'Hamnet' and 'The Marriage Portrait' don't just tell two women's stories. They make the case, twice over, for why those stories were worth telling at all.

View on Amazon