Have You Done Your Re-Vision?!

First a PSA - Jane Casey’s The Secret Room, the twelfth in the Maeve Kerrigan series – has been released. Unsurprisingly I scarfed this down one sunny day, and have been wallowing in the realisation that I have another two years to wait until the next one. For the uninitiated, this series of police procedurals follows the London-Irish detective, Maeve Kerrigan, whose neither/nor status positions her in the typically liminal position of literary detectives, but without the traditional failures of the hard-boiled genre. Which is to say, Maeve is an absurdly competent DC who rises the ranks by solving impossibly complex cases with her signature observation and people skills, but without the tragic backstory. Maeve is no lone wolf, and working closely alongside her is the utterly compelling and brilliantly complex DI Josh Derwent. With characters that will stay with you long after reading, Casey layers the personal and professional, while crafting crimes that will have you decoding the red herrings from the true clues right to the end. The Secret Room follows on from a shock cliffhanger, weaving a locked-room mystery, Maeve’s private struggles, and a secondary crime that involves her close friend and boss, DI Josh Derwent. With a shock ending that [elided], this is a classic crime in a Golden Age of its own.

But now for the main event. I’ve been thinking of historical novels recently through Adrienne Rich’s concept of re-vision, or feminist critique. In Rich’s words, “[r]e-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival” (35). Now, Rich was talking of canonical literature and the importance of approaching old books predominantly written by white men with a discerning modern gaze, of close-reading and interrogating assumptions that were made about women and gender (and today we can add a host of intersectional issues). Re-vision, it is important to note, is not the same as using other texts as sources, or adapting and modernising classic texts.

        For example, Clueless reimagines Emma, She’s The Man plays on Twelfth Night, Ten Things I Hate About You springs from The Taming of the Shrew, Bridget Jones modernises Pride and Prejudice, and in many respects North and South Victorianises Austen’s classic, (truly the list goes on). That’s not to say that films which adapt the canon by bringing fresh, intersectional feminist perspectives are not important (Clueless is a vital, nay seminal, text). But the films and novel above are examples of adaptation, whereas the novels I’ve been thinking about fit into another category, one I’m not sure exactly how to classify.

Take Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier for instance, which contextualises the famous Vermeer painting by giving a fictional account of its artist and focusing on its mysterious subject. Is this re-vision? It looks back with fresh eyes, enters a new [painting] from the point of view of the actual subject – the eponymous girl. This mysterious woman was previously the subject of scrutiny and imagination, and despite the evident skill and beauty of the painting, a two-dimensional spectacle created by a man. But Chevalier’s fictional account breathed depth and body into Vermeer’s muse.

There is a notable trend in recent years, (well, Girl was published in 1999), that illuminates the lives of history’s forgotten women – those with rich backstories and talents of their own that were eclipsed by the men who painted, married, or became famous off their image, and even, work.

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (2022) is one such feminist historical novel, which follows Lucrezia de Medici, daughter of Cosimo, who died by suspected poison at aged 16, only a year after marriage. Inspired by Robert Browning’s poem My Last Duchess, O’Farrell, as one Guardian review states, has combined “historical fact, portraiture and poetic fantasy together and used them as the basis for a piece of fiction in which a simple tale, of a girl forced too young into a dynastic marriage, is overlaid and embellished with elements from fairytale and myth.”

With its impetus to right the wrongs against this young woman, and reclaim her story from the mist of supposition and victimhood that has centred not her own life but that of the man she married, O’Farrell’s novel revises historical accounts to paint a feminist portrait of a newly centralised Lucrezia. Imbuing new myth and fairytale that subverts the old narrative, is one way to do this. Lucrezia is O’Farrell’s novel, is given an affinity with animals that speaks to the woman-animal bond that is often used as an ideological tool to equate and relegate both to a lesser state than men. It is a common and age-old equivalence that O’Farrell uses to great effect, creating an unsettling sense of entrapment within the patriarchal structure which aligns and derogates Lucrezia and the wild animals her father keeps. Lucrezia possesses an extraordinary ability as a very young child to pet tigers, and later impresses the renowned artist Giorgio Vasari with her own ability to convey perspective in her drawings.

Perhaps more accurately, The Marriage Portrait is a re-imagining, much like Elizabeth Fremantle’s Disobedient (2023), in which the talented artist Artemisia Gentileschi, patronised by the Medici’s, takes centre stage. Both are historical novels that re-envision two gifted (and artistic) women whose lives were unimaginably dictated and circumscribed by powerful and immoral men.

In a similar vein, The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable (2024) takes another remarkably talented woman as its protagonist, and not unrelatedly, was my last and most memorable read of 2024. Based on the real figure of Anna Maria della Pietà, the protégée of Antonio Vivaldi, this feminist reclamation foregrounds the strong-willed, brilliant, and resilient woman whose story was subsumed by her proximity to one of the most famous and influential male composers. In 18th-century Venice, Anna Maria is one of many babies delivered through a gap in the walls of an orphanage governed by nuns. Here, in the Ospedale della Pietà, abandoned girls are given an exceptional musical education, with the most gifted forming an orchestra unparalleled throughout the republic—the figlie di coro. Under the direction of Vivaldi, Anna Maria emerges as a violin virtuoso, her ambition to become maestro a palpable obsession that propels the plot. Experiencing music as colour, Anna Maria’s genius springs to life through vivid synaesthesia, while the relationship between master and pupil develops from an intense mentorship to a dynamic of even greater complexity. Constable’s atmospheric reimagining captures the creation of The Four Seasons and the battle between female autonomy and patriarchal oppression in an age where agency was denied even the most fortunate. I regularly recommend this novel for its moving portrayal of an unjustly neglected talent that subverts the perceived identities of artist and muse. It is a timely reminder that music, creativity, and talent can transcend the most literal cloisters and figurative confines.

        By rendering Anna Maria’s musical ability through the prism of synaesthesia, Constable paints her talent in kaleidoscopic beauty, quite literally illuminating her previously ignored genius. Just as O’Farrell challenges the woman-animal association by empowering Lucrezia’s affinity, The Instrumentalist undermines the perceived impediments of neurodiversity. By plucking multi-coloured notes out of thin air and drawing them towards the page, Anna Maria innovates out of innate flair and tireless exertion, to surpass even Vivaldi and amaze the celebrated Giuseppe Tartini. I was Spotifying The Devil’s Trill and The Four Seasons while I read, completely absorbed in the world of violin virtuosity. I still love Vivaldi, but I will always listen with an altered perspective thanks to this feminist retrieval.  

Works Cited

Hughes-Hallet, Lucy. “The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell Review – A Dark

Renaissance fable.” The Guardian, 26 Aug 2022.

Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision” (1971) in Rich, Adrienne.

        On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979).