Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance

Description

An engaging portrait of the surprisingly unconventional marriage between Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli from one of our best young non-fiction writers. He was a debt-ridden dandy, a mid-ranking novelist armed with enormous political ambition.She was a moneyed widow twelve years older than her new husband, always overdressed for society dinners and never one to hold her tongue.From the outset, Mary Anne and Benjamin Disraeli made an unlikely match, yet they rose to the very pinnacle of Victorian society.Drawing on the couple's love letters and Mary Anne's own formidable archives, Daisy Hay reveals the heady mix of romance and power that fuelled their influence - and chronicles how the Disraelis crafted their unconventional marriage into an enduring love story.

Daisy Hay was born in Oxford in 1981. She is the author of Young Romantics- The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, for which she was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy and highly commended by the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She has a BA and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Romantic and Sentimental Literature from the University of York. In 2009-10 she was the Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford and in 2010-12 she held a visiting scholarship at Wolfson College, Oxford. In 2012-13 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. She is currently a Lecturer in English Literature and Archival Studies at the University of Exeter, and a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker. She lives in Devon.

A tour de force, written with intelligence and compassion * The Times * Thorough and engaging... A warm and rounded portrait * Daily Telegraph * A fabulous book, as if Jane Austen were writing for a modern newspaper... Full of wonderfully observed detail... A great story of life and loves in a time when making the right marriage really mattered * Independent * All marriages have their mysteries, political marriages more than most. The marriage of Mr and Mrs Disraeli was stranger than fiction, but every bit as compelling -- Robert McCrum * The Observer * A beguiling account of a very unusual marriage -- Daisy Goodwin * Sunday Times * As with all the best biographers, Hay makes her readers drag their feet towards the end, reluctant to part company with people she has made us know and feel for. Her book has turned the Disraelis' uneven romance into a real love story. How pleased they would have been * Guardian *