The Second Duchess
The Second Duchess, to be published in February 2011 by NAL, takes as its jumping-off point Robert Browning’s much-studied and much-loved dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess.” In the poem, the urbane and cultivated Duke—based, according to Browning, on the historical Alfonso II d’Este, the fifth Duke of Ferrara—seems to reveal himself as a madman and the murderer of his first wife, even while coolly negotiating for a second wife to step into her shoes. In this carefully researched and re-imagined continuation of the poem’s story, nothing is quite that simple.
The narrator of the story is the Duke of Ferrara’s second wife, Barbara of Austria: sensible, quick-witted, and courageous enough—or desperate enough—to become the second Duchess of Ferrara despite whispers the Duke murdered his beautiful young first wife for nothing more than a smile or two. The glorious court of Ferrara offers literature, art, music, sport, gaiety, a way of life Barbara longs for with every fiber of her being, and she embraces it with delight—but soon she learns she cannot close her eyes and ears forever.
In a parallel narrative the murdered first Duchess speaks—beautiful Lucrezia de’ Medici, hardly more than a child, willful, sensual, and vengeful. Little by little, as she observes and comments on Barbara’s life, passions and dangers in Ferrara, she reveals her own truth about her life and death.