Venetia (Disraeli novel)

Venetia is a minor novel by Benjamin Disraeli, published in 1837, the year he was first elected to the House of Commons.

The novel traces the eponymous heroine’s development from romantic idealist into social pragmatist against a backdrop of British industrialisation.^[1]

A contemporary reviewer, writing in an 1854 issue of the New Monthly Review, declared that he “liked it least of all Disraeli’s works.”

Lord Byron and Shelley figure in its pages, under different names and different worldly circumstances from those in which they actually lived. We do not consider either portrait well drawn, and that of Shelley especially defective; but still Venetia, like all that Disraeli has written, contains much that is vivid and beautiful, and will be read with interest and delight by every man of taste.^[2]

Michael Flavin’s Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as a Political Discourse suggests that Venetia was a largely commercial endeavour for Disraeli, who was deeply in debt at the time that he wrote it.

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