A Strange Romance

Mr and Mrs Disraeli

An engaging portrait of the surprisingly unconventional marriage between Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli from one of our best young non-fiction writers.

A tour de force, written with intelligence and compassion

Thorough and engaging... A warm and rounded portrait

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

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

A beguiling account of a very unusual marriage

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

It is a great story of life and loves in a time when making the right marriage really mattered

A beguiling account of a very unusual marriage

Above all, the Disraelis’ is a love story, and it is this unusual but most human of tales that gives this book its raison d’être

What Hay does is ask us to think more subtly about a marriage that, no matter how peculiar to onlookers, facilitated one of the greatest parliamentary careers of modern times

Daisy hay paints a picture of a strange yet real romance between Bejamin and Mary Anne Disraeli

Reminds us, yet again, how much more complex and intriguing the Victorians were than we might think

Hay brings alive an unusual marriage with skill and imagination.

The story is well known, but Hay’s lively retelling only makes you want to applaud again the two clever commoners who outplayed the ruling elite and changed the course of British history.

This detailed and wonderful book shows how the couple defined one another and paints a fascinating picture of a loving and supportive partnership.

Daisy Hay’s dual biography offers a vivid portrait of a marriage that confounded their friends but proved to be happy and enduring.

Touching story, which [Hay] tells with an exhilarating combination of pace and erudition… A real love story.

Daisy Hay is an award-winning biographer whose previous work includes Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives and Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance. She began her writing career as a doctoral student and then a Bye-Fellow at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge before moving to Oxford where she held the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony's College and a Visiting Scholarship at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College. She has also held a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard. In 2016 she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize by the Leverhulme Trust and in 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Associate Professor in English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter and lives in Devon with her family.

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

Hay's meticulously researched biography, rich in period and personal detail, sheds light on both Johnson and the vibrant cultural world he inhabited

[A] compelling and magnificent study... Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an admirable achievement of biography and humanistic imagination

Dinner with Joseph Johnson sheds much-needed light on a key figure in both the ideological and material context of the 18th century... Hay's meticulous research brings this "paper age" to life... Evokes the noise and excitement of an age characterised by the unceasing hum of literary debate... a fitting reflection of the period that Hay describes: a time when the written word could make someone's name - or cost them their liberty

This delightful book by the English literature professor Daisy Hay gives the reader the feeling of being at a rather elevated party... Johnson's guests talked, wrote and painted about democracy, human rights, atheism, feminism, anatomy, chemistry and electricity. While dreaming of a better future, they befriended each other, loved each other and criticised each other... shaped an era... Johnson was a brilliant talent spotter and supported the best minds of his day

A portrait of literary ferment... Daisy Hay's compendious and impressive survey illuminates the contribution to these significant ideological shifts of the ill-assorted men and women whose kinship was marked by their shared participation in Joseph Johnson's hospitality

Hay makes the most of a vivid period in English and especially London history. Her carefully poised study puts Johnson, today an obscure figure, back at the centre of his circle

A beautifully packaged, skilfully written and detailed book that finally gives this gentle revolutionary the recognition he deserves

Chronicling Johnson's fascinating dining companions and the changes that rocked Britain during the period, this is a feast for those interested in the 18th century

Marvellous... The list of [Joseph Johnson's] guests reads like a who's who revolutionary politics and culture: abolitionist MPs, Jacobin agents, pioneering scientists and radical preachers... Panoramic and kaleidoscopic

It makes little sense to approach a character of such extensive and various connections as the bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson other than via the clubbable sort of method at which Daisy Hay has already proven herself adept... In Dinner with Joseph Johnson, she has again broadened her scope... Hay pursues lines of enquiry with patience and sensitivity to detail

Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize* 
 
In late eighteenth-century London, a group of extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week. 
 
The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller and he was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of great minds including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Henry Fuseli, Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. 
 
Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today. 
 
'Rich in period and personal detail' Guardian 
 
'Hugely engrossing' Sunday Times

Daisy Hay

Praise for Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Hay's meticulously researched biography, rich in period and personal detail, sheds light on both Johnson and the vibrant cultural world he inhabited

[A] compelling and magnificent study... Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an admirable achievement of biography and humanistic imagination

Dinner with Joseph Johnson sheds much-needed light on a key figure in both the ideological and material context of the 18th century... Hay's meticulous research brings this "paper age" to lif ...

Hay's meticulously researched biography, rich in period and personal detail, sheds light on both Johnson and the vibrant cultural world he inhabited

[A] compelling and magnificent study... Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an admirable achievement of biography and humanistic imagination

Dinner with Joseph Johnson sheds much-needed light on a key figure in both the ideological and material context of the 18th century... Hay's meticulous research brings this "paper age" to lif ...

Hay's meticulously researched biography, rich in period and personal detail, sheds light on both Johnson and the vibrant cultural world he inhabited

[A] compelling and magnificent study... Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an admirable achievement of biography and humanistic imagination

Dinner with Joseph Johnson sheds much-needed light on a key figure in both the ideological and material context of the 18th century... Hay's meticulous research brings this "paper age" to lif ...

Books by Daisy Hay

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