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 married mistress in a strapless dress. The remarketing of these novels seems to have backfired, however, and the bodice-ripping covers are the last the book saw. Both novels are well out of print. Reviews old or new are scarce online (not one word has been written on Goodreads about Disraeli Rising). The mismatch between intelligent text and sensual mass-marketing may have shrunk the audience for the books and consigned them to a fate worse than the bargain bin.

Edelman’s novels, however, are great (campy) fun. In fact, they improbably represent the best entertainment we have about Dizzy. Disraeli, the splashy dandy prime minister with a quick wit and a sensational life story, has always been crying out to be made into fabulous fiction. But creatives have struggled to produce stories that live up to his promise, as the two films named Disraeli (1929 and 1978) and one named The Prime Minister (1941) all attest. The films emphasize his statesmanship to the point of dullness, flattening out the lively dandy, novelist, man of letters and wit. By contrast, the surprise in Edelman’s novels is that rather than being trashy romance pulp that fudges the truth of Disraeli and his relationships, Disraeli in Love and Disraeli Rising present a relatively serious fictionalization that follows the history both of Disraeli’s politics and his love life fairly closely. The true story is sensational enough on its own to make an entertaining novel. 

For those who felt the way I did about Disraeli’s 1830s romance novel Henrietta Temple, that it left out everything interesting in Disraeli’s romance with the married Henrietta Sykes, Disraeli in Love is another option. It tells the story of the young Disraeli, loaded with debt and seeking a parliamentary career, bedding a married woman whose connections would lead by novel’s end to a seat in the House of Commons. Edelman mostly follows the lines of the evidence but when a paucity of information forces a choice, he usually flatters the young Benjamin Disraeli. He also opts to glamorize what may have been a less sincere relationship than he makes it out to be, as my review of Henrietta Temple argues. The politics are a somewhat rosy view of young Ben’s early leanings, as Edelman does fictionalize certain events to create the appearance that Disraeli always cared about the poor as much as he seemed to when he wrote Sybil. Disraeli showed limited interest in what was then called “the condition of England” until later in his career. 

Disraeli Rising is full of the many secondary characters who populated Disraeli’s life as he rose in parliament from 1837-1852. It begins with the great dandy Count D’Orsay forcibly suggesting that it’s time for Disraeli to get married (“Marriage is all the rage. You must get married, Ben”), though not in the more colorful terms that he actually did (“You will not make love! You will not intrigue! You have your seat; do not risk anything! If you meet with a widow, then marry!”, as quoted in Stanley Weintraub’s biography Disraeli.) Immediately thereafter in Edelman’s narrative, Disraeli is in fact courting a widow for her money: Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis. The only two or three characters who don’t appear in Disraeli biographies include George Inglefield, who becomes engaged to Sarah Disraeli, Benjamin’s sister. This is by far the oddest choice in the book as Sarah died unmarried. The second most absurd choice is the over-indulgence of a character that should have remained in the periphery, Mrs. Clarissa Edmonds. In the novel, she is a former mistress of Disraeli’s who stalks him and tries to break him. Though she is not in the index of any of the Disraeli biographies I checked, Edmonds is mentioned in Robert Blake's seminal biography as a forger who briefly embarrasses Disraeli before his lawyer unmasks her scheme. I also found a footnote in a paper on the insanity defense that suggested she had in fact been rumored to be Disraeli’s mistress and to have tried to finance an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Peel. Clarissa’s supposed involvement in the latter plot is only briefly alluded to in Disraeli Rising as a paranoid fever dream on the part of Peel himself. But the assault, which killed an assistant to Peel, is given a surprising amount of space as it mostly leaves Disraeli behind and focuses on the perspective of both Peel and his unfortunate assistant.

Edelman’s research is thorough, as is to some extent his portrait of Disraeli. In the relentlessly heterosexual world of the historical romance novel, for example, he could have easily ignored what many scholars consider to be Disraeli’s homosexual side. But both novels address it at least in passing. In Disraeli in Love Edelman gives us a delicious paragraph utilizing the character of Musaeus from Disraeli’s novel Contarini Fleming. Musaeus was, to an astonishing extent, an open lover of Disraeli’s semiautobiographical character Contarini in their mutual school days. Edelman writes the Musaeus story as though it happened to Disraeli, which it well may have. That Disraeli's effeminate side vanishes for the length of the first book is less fun and less rigorous. But Edelman returns to the subject in Disraeli Rising as he seeks to explicate the puzzling relationship between Disraeli and Lord Henry Lennox, a younger man to whom he wrote declarations of “love.” Blake explains away the use of love language as the “hyperbole” of the time, but admits to being baffled as to why Disraeli lavished such attention on so “trivial” a person. In Disraeli Rising the young parliamentarian explains his relationship with Lennox by saying “he provides me with a lot of information.” His wife, a sugar momma first and a love match only later, replies “Is that all?” It’s not the last quip she makes about Lennox.

It’s surprising how little bodice-ripping there is particularly in the second novel. Disraeli and his wife-to-be get it on in their first encounter in the book, which seems a bit premature for the relationship in 1837, then never return to bed again. The first novel is steamier, depicting in detail what gets Disraeli over a bout of dysfunction with his older lover. But Edelman’s interest in the evolution of Disraeli’s politics often takes precedence over the romance.

Disraeli in Love was published in the wake of Blake’s classic 1966 biography of Disraeli, at a time when centennial interest was high in Disraeli’s 19^th Century career as prime minister. With Disraeli’s oldest novel turning 200 this year, there is little keeping these fascinating old books alive, despite a robust burst of scholarship on them in the last 20-40 years. Thus, it’s interesting to revisit a pair of books that make the case Disraeli can be a mass entertainment experience. Dizzy is as colorful a character as politics has ever given us. He is worthy of more than these novels, and a better film or play than the 20^th Century gave us, but if one is interested in a fictional treatment of the full Disraeli these novels are the best starting point. Just ignore the covers.