Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell - Review

I love Maggie O'Farrell, as you probably know, as I've read and reviewed a few of her books over the course of this blog, and I recommend The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox a lot because I really like it. I follow Maggie's Facebook page so I had heard of this book, but I hadn't ever picked it up. But then it was a book club choice for this year, so when I saw it in a sale in WH Smith I picked it up for a fiver. I was apprehensive because I wasn't sure if it would be a bit too high brow for me. But I picked it up.

And I ended up loving it and I now want everyone I know to read it! I lent it to someone at book club but then I will lend it to my mum because I think she will like it. 

So, if you don't know, Hamnet was the only son of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. I knew that, and I knew he died as a child, of the plague. I also knew that he had a twin, Judith, and an older sister, Susanna. But I didn't know much else about his life. And I had a vague impression that the play Hamlet was called that after him. 

Which, indeed, it was. The book starts by saying that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable at the time. Then Hamnet himself is watching Judith as she becomes unwell with what is the bubonic plague. He goes downstairs in the house looking for his mother, his sister, or his grandmother, but can't find any of them. Susanna and his grandmother, Mary, are running errands. His mother is out at Hewlands, her familial home. Hamnet fears his sister will die. 

Lee and I visited Shakespeare's house in Stratford on Avon back in 2020 so it was great that I could envisage the house perfectly. We also went to Anne Hathaway's house but couldn't go in because it was closed due to Covid. But it meant I knew what it looked like. 

So in the book Shakespeare himself is away in London, working and acting and earning his living. The book goes back in time, though, to when he and Anne met. In the book she is called Agnes, because apparently her father's will named her as so. Maggie has really done her research! 

Agnes' mother is portrayed as having been a bit of a witch, a healer, that kind of thing. She died and Agnes' father married Joan, and they had several more children. Agnes and her brother Bartholemew are close in the novel, but she and Joan don't get on. John Shakespeare - William's dad, who he's portrayed as having a volatile relationship with, and who was a glove maker by trade - owed Agnes' dad some money or something and as payment John arranged for William - aged just eighteen - to go tutor some of the younger boys. There he met Agnes, who was older than him and a bit of a wild girl, and who was desperate to leave her stepmother's house. They clearly got married and had Susanna and then the twins. 

The books flips backwards and forwards in time to William and Agnes' relationship and Agnes in particular and how she dealt with her husband and how unhappy he was in Stratford. I don't know how much of this is true but I don't care. It was a good narrative. I also learnt that Hamnet's cause of death is not actually recorded, but it's assumed he did die of the plague. I loved Agnes as a character and I think the book really showed just how difficult life was back then. She didn't have it easy and neither did the rest of the family. 

I think my book club will as a whole have really enjoyed the book but I'm interested for the discussion! I'm giving it five out of five because I loved it. 

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell - Review

I chose this book last year as my choice for my book club. I had bought it when it came out around September 2022 and I thought it would be a good book for book club. It was September's choice and I picked it up right at the end of August so that I could get it read as it's quite a hefty book. I wanted to read it in a certain number of days so I broke it down into pages per day and actually ended up keeping to that. It helped that I had an empty weekend which meant I had a lot of reading time in the mornings and at night. It is worth every one of it's 450 pages, in my opinion. 

I can't even remember why I bought it, but I probably saw a review of it or something. I have really enjoyed the Maggie O'Farrell books I've read so far - The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox which I read in the late noughties, and I Am I Am I Am which I read in 2019. So I knew this would be good too. By the time I picked it up though I had totally forgotten what it was about. 

It's about Lucrezia de' Medici, a princess of the Medici family who was brought up in Florence, firstly in Palazzo Vecchio and then Palazzo Pitti. At the beginning of the book she is at a country fort with her husband, Alfonso, and she is utterly certain that he is going to kill her. He brought her there without any of her ladies in waiting or other staff, and by the end of the book we have seen just how cruel he was to her and why she would definitely think he was about to kill her. 

But we also read about Lucrezia's early life in the palace, her family and her education and how she was ostracised from the family. She had two sisters and several brothers, but somehow never fitted into the bosom of the family. Her eldest sister, Maria, was betrothed to Alfonso - who is over a decade older than Lucrezia - but she died and it was decided that he would marry Lucrezia instead. She has a little reprieve as she hasn't yet reached menstruation, but as soon as she does, the two are married and Lucrezia is off to Ferrera, never to see Florence again. 

As with any novel about real people, it is hard for the reader to decide what is real and what isn't real. I resisted the urge to read about Lucrezia's life until after I had finished the book, although I did read that she did die aged sixteen and that there were rumours that her husband had poisoned her, but that it is now thought she died of TB. I think because of that I did see some of the twists of the book coming, but that didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book. At the end of the book there's a note about some of the ways that the book deviates from reality, which I found really interesting. I think for book club I will put together some notes about that for discussion. It is interesting in how much novelists can deviate from reality and at what remove - I feel like Lucrezia de' Medici is up for grabs because she died five hundred years ago. There are few people left who would care about her, surely? But the closer we get to today, the less readers will let authors get away with stuff like this - imagine writing a similar book about the Queen, for example. 

I also think it is interesting about how little power or choice women had in this period. Lucrezia is a pawn in her own life, used between powerful men to gain even more power. She lives a spoilt, pampered life, but she also has no rights to choose what to wear, how to wear her hair, etc. I liked the little rebellions she had, I really liked her as a character.

I also really liked the stuff about the painting of 'the marriage portrait' which doesn't actually exist but which poet Robert Browning wrote about too. I hope most of that stuff was true because it was so interesting!

In all I'm giving this five out of five because I really liked it! I'm interested to see what everyone at book club thought about it!

I Am I Am I Am by Maggie O'Farrell - Review

I recently plucked this book off the shelves in our back bedroom. My friend Laura bought it for me either this Christmas or last; she had read it and really enjoyed it. I thought it was time to get to it.

I've read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie, I read it a long time ago and really enjoyed it, I would recommend it. This book is autobiographical, and it chronicles seventeen near brushes with death that Maggie has had. From a near miss on a trail to jumping into the sea to impress some friends, to her childhood encephalitis, the Caesarean she had with her first child, and finally to her daughter's severe allergies.

I read it quickly, because each chapter is just like a little essay and really easy to read. Maggie has a gorgeously lyrical way of writing which comes through even in life writing like this, putting the reader in exactly the place that she was at the time. I could imagine the exotic locales really easily, I could see the hospital rooms perfectly. I liked how sometimes she switched from first person to second person; perhaps from a writing point of view it is purely to distance herself from having to relive the pain of whatever incident she's referring to (and it does seem to happen more in the more traumatic stories), but it also works to engage the reader to imagine themselves as the one in danger. There were bits I found really funny and bits I related to, but it was all really good to read and I'm glad I picked the book up.

I did some life writing myself in my MA and I really like it. I could almost write a book like this myself, and reading it has made me think a bit more about memory and about how we write about our own lives.

I'm giving this a well-deserved ten out of ten. I know I have other novels by Maggie, and now I really want to go and seek them out!