Review: Edelman’s “Disraeli in Love” and “Disraeli Rising,” mismarketed as 1970s romance novels, died an unfortunate death
In 1972, the year that The Flame and the Flower launched the sexy historical genre known as the modern “bodice-ripper,” a British MP named Maurice Edelman quietly released an intelligent, campy biographical novel with an unassumingly unsexy cover: Disraeli in Love. The novel quickly sold 400,000 copies in hardcover, perhaps from an audience that skewed male. By the late 1970s the paperback racks of drugstores and airports had been taken over by Harlequin Enterprises and the bodice-ripper. Thus, when Disraeli in Love 's sequel, Disraeli Rising, appeared in 1978, it was packaged like The Flame and the Flower , with a mature Disraeli in a crimson smoking jacket, standing behind a bare-shouldered woman in a black evening dress with his hands seemingly slipping down to her almost-bare bosom. In 1984, Stein & Day followed up with an equally bodice-boasting paperback cover to Disraeli in Love , featuring a younger Disraeli in a dashing dandy’s attire playing tonsil-hockey with a mar...