Book Review: Mr. and Mrs. Disreali: A Strange Romance by Daisy Hay
It is the end of the year, and that means all sorts of “year’s best” lists are coming out. I like to troll the lists of books for any that seem interesting, that I may have missed. It was on one of those lists that I came across Mr. and Mrs. Disreali: A Strange Romance by Daisy Hay. This is a non-fiction book. It is kind of a biography, kind of not. I very much suspect that the majority of it was Hay’s dissertation, or something similar.
This book traces the lives and relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Disreali. Do you know who they are? I did not, not before I read the book. She was no one famous in her own right, but he was an author of popular novels and served as British Prime Minister twice during the reign of Victoria. He is, to this day, the only British PM of Jewish birth ever.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Disreali kept a lot of their papers, letters to each other, with relatives, other lovers, etc, and those are what Hay draws on to write this book. I do not want to call it a biography of people so much as the biography of a relationship.
It is not the easiest reading and jumps around in time quite often- never by a lot, but enough that you could have been reading about the 1830s in one paragraph, get jumped to the 1840s, and then be back specifically in 1837 two pages later. The book appears to be organized thematically more than chronologically. It is carefully dated and annotated, but it can make for a little confusion as the reader moves through the “story”.
If this had been an assigned text when I was in college, I can pretty much guarantee I would not have read it. (But then, I read very little of my assigned reading in college.) It is not a book that I would recommend to everyone. And you are not going to get through it in one setting. The writing is dry, but the affection for the two subjects is quite clear. If you like history, if you find relationships interesting, and find the ways in which people attempt to shape their own stories- past, present, and future –fascinating, this is a book worth picking up.
