The film, Hamnet, is an adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel with the same name. (Photo: Wikimedia/AI)
Six years after Hamnet was first published, its author, Maggie O’Farrell, has never been more popular, and for good reason.
Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of the novel – which explores the anguish and troubled marriage of William Shakespeare (essayed by Paul Mescal) and his wife (Jessie Buckley) — reimagined here as Agnes, rather than the historical Anne Hathaway — after they lose their 11-year-old son Hamnet, took home two British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) for Outstanding British Film and Best Leading Actor, which Buckley won for her heart-wrenching portrayal of a grieving mother.
The film, which grossed over $70 million at the worldwide box office, has collectively racked up nominations for 11 British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs), eight Academy Awards (Oscars), and six Golden Globes. The Irish author’s next novel, Land, a 19th-century historical fiction due later this year, has already secured a film adaptation by the Hamnet producer Liza Marshall of Hera Pictures.
In part due to the film’s roaring popularity, many readers are just discovering O’Farrell, who has been writing for 25 years. Land will be her 10th book, while Hamnet was her eighth. For those hoping to pursue more of her work, here is where to begin:
Hamnet
TL;DR: Hamnet lying on a dark brown wooden table "> Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet has been adapted for screen by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao.
Hamnet lying on a dark brown wooden table "> Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet has been adapted for screen by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao. (source: amazon.in/AI)
The novel, which earned O’Farrell the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, centers on William Shakespeare’s herbalist wife, Agnes, a woman reduced to a footnote in the playwright’s biographies. Left behind in Stratford-upon-Avon with her children, while her husband wrote plays that would immortalise him as the most famous English playwright. In O’Farrell’s hands, she finds love, births and mothers children and grieves the tragic loss of her child. This is O’Farrell’s great subject – women who existed in the margins of someone else’s story.
The Marriage Portrait (2022)
TL;DR: The Marriage Portrait lying on a dark brown wooden table "> Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait is inspired by Robert Browning’s poem, poem ‘My Last Duchess’.
The Marriage Portrait lying on a dark brown wooden table "> Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait is inspired by Robert Browning’s poem, poem ‘My Last Duchess’.
Anyone who has taken an English literature course will remember Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”, a poem about a Duke, who boasts about how he permanently ended his too-cheerful wife’s smiles. The Marriage Portrait (2022), gives voice to Lucrezia de’ Medici, the teenage bride immortalised by Browning as the woman in the painting, murdered by a husband who couldn’t stand her smile. O’Farrell gives her an inner life so vivid that reading the novel feels like watching someone claw her way out of a portrait frame. The Florence she conjures is claustrophobic and the marriage is a cage gilded with the finest gold leaf.
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
TL;DR: Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox takes readers to the Victorian asylums.
Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox takes readers to the Victorian asylums. (Source: amazon.in/AI)
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006) gives voice to the “difficult girls” who disappeared into Victorian psychiatric institutions for the crime of wanting and feeling too much. Esme is 16 when she is committed by her family for being too fond of a half-Indian boy. Sixty years later, when the asylums shut down and the long-forgotten inmates are reunited with their estranged families, she emerges perfectly sane. The novel cuts between her institutional voice and her great-niece Iris’s present-day attempts to understand what happened.
I Am, I Am, I Am
TL;DR: Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am is structured around 17 encounters with death.
Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am is structured around 17 encounters with death. (Source: amazon.in/AI)
O’Farrell memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am (2017) is structured around 17 encounters with death. It is also about her daughter, who has a severe immune condition, which could make a simple cold catastrophic. O’Farrell writes about what it means to love someone whose survival depends on constant vigilance. The prose is so stripped back that one feels physically winded. If you read nothing else, read this.
Where to Start
TL;DR: If you are discovering O’Farrell after watching her film start with Hamnet .
If you are discovering O’Farrell after watching her film start with Hamnet. Then follow Agnes into The Marriage Portrait. If you want the full range of what she can do, read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and I Am, I Am, I Am back to back.
Curated by Dr. Elena Rodriguez
