Mr and Mrs Disraeli

‘Ostensibly, “Mr and Mrs Disraeli” is a portrait of a marriage once considered an absurd mismatch. But the pair had much in common … Both were romantics and mythmakers, inventing and reinventing themselves to suit each other and their circumstances. All this Ms Hay brings out with scholarly perceptiveness’, The Economist

‘A highly individual contribution to the historical study of what has come to be called “separate spheres”: the idea that women, because of the constraints of biology, law and custom, inhabited the domestic shadows more than the public realm’, Wall Street Journal

‘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

‘Erudite yet enchanting’, Evening Standard

‘This is a fabulous book, as if Jane Austen were writing for a modern newspaper’, The Independent

‘[Hay’s] picture of the Disraelis’ relationship, before and during the marriage, tells its own story … The marriage of Mr and Mrs Disraeli was stranger than fiction, but every bit as compelling’, The Observer

‘Hay is one of the new school of biographers who go beyond the conventional chronological narrative to discover the roads not taken, the unspoken realities beneath the factual skeleton … [she] brings alive a marriage that has always been a puzzle to Disraeli’s conventional biographers with skill and imagination’, Sunday Times

‘Hay’s book is a tour de force, written with intelligence and compassion’, The Times

‘Warm and rounded’, Daily Telegraph

Daisy on the Disraelis in The Guardian, available here.

Daisy on Disraeli in the Daily Telegraph, available here.