In the Library
My Last Duchess
Robert Browning, 1842
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Othello
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare writes the same jealousy that becomes murder, but gives the duchess a voice the Duke silences.
£1.99
The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe
Poe's narrator insists on his own calm and reason while describing a murder, the same chilling composure that lets the Duke show off a portrait and confess a killing in one breath.
£1.99
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wallpaper studies the same silencing of a wife by a husband certain he knows what is best for her, but tells it from behind the woman's own eyes.
£1.99
About the book
The Duke of Ferrara draws a curtain back to show a stranger the portrait of his dead wife, and the polished courtesy of his voice never once falters as he explains, by degrees, why she had to die. She smiled too readily, he complains: a sunset, a bough of cherries someone broke for her in the orchard, his own nine-hundred-years-old name, every kindness earned the same warm look, and he would not stoop to ask her to ration it. So he gave commands, and then all smiles stopped together. Browning hands you one long unbroken speech and lets the speaker damn himself inside his own good manners, each silky aside a confession he has no idea he is making. The horror of My Last Duchess is not the murder but the poise: a connoisseur already appraising his next bride while a bronze Neptune tames a sea-horse on the wall, the dead woman smiling now for no one but him, and only when he chooses to draw the curtain.