Review: Disraeli's "Henrietta Temple" is not biography, but it would be better if it was
Having heard that Benjamin Disraeli’s 1837 novel Henrietta Temple: A Love Story was a semiautobiographical telling of his relationship with a woman named Henrietta Sykes between 1833 and 1836, I had long looked forward to reading his account of this open affair with an older, richer, married woman. Such relationships were rare in the annals of literature--and in real life--in his day. But when I opened the book, I discovered it was not a retelling of his relationship with Lady Sykes, but instead yet another Regency novel about an older man in love with a younger, poorer, unmarried woman, in a relationship wherein one or both parties must choose between love and money. We have Jane Austen for that. Naturally Disraeli did not owe his readers accuracy about his sex life, and the mores of the day made it impossible to write about many of the things he would perhaps have loved to write about. But to modern readers the novel would be more interesting if it were more like his fas...