If Lord Byron had been Jewish, or if Oscar Wilde had become leader of the Conservative Party, either one of them would have cut a figure something like Benjamin Disraeli. “Disraeli's career was a romance such as no Eastern vizier or Western plutocrat could tell,” observed Shane Leslie in 1916. “Wilde wrote his life into plays, but Disraeli was his own actor. Wilde accused nature of copying literature, but Disraeli actually made his novels come true. In Tancred”—a Zionist fantasia avant la lettre—“he described the military occupation of Cyprus which he carried out as a prime minister forty years later” (The End of a Chapter [1916], 112).

Such is the methodological premise of this biography, Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, and historians should not dismiss it simply because Robert O'Kell is based in an English department (at the University of Manitoba). We are learning that we can often find the roots of political action in the literature politicians wrote or read. This is a new approach to historiography, but others have already shown how much it can reveal and explain: Kevin J. Hayes in The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2008), Ruth Clayton Windscheffel in Reading Gladstone (2008), Timothy Ryback in Hitler's Private Library (2008), and James Kloppenberg in Reading Obama (2011).

The same method of investigation can work for Disraeli, and not just for the obvious reason, namely, his two-track career as an imaginative novelist and an equally imaginative statesman. In fact, no conventional political biography can fully explain how he managed to shimmy up to the top of the greasy pole. “The most striking aspect of Disraeli's life,” O'Kell begins, “must surely be its sheer implausibility” (3). He was exactly the kind of parvenu that the British establishment was organized to keep out. He was everything that they expected a Jew would be: ambitious, opportunistic, disloyal, scheming, bumptious, self-advertising, mired from the start in financial, journalistic, and sexual scandal. They had to grant that he was clever with words, but only insofar as he used them to beguile, manipulate, and wound.

Such a character could only become prime minister in melodramatic novels, and so he wrote a raft of them and acted them out on the political stage. Frequently, O'Kell concludes, “Disraeli became the victim of his fantasy about his own self-importance” (13). But his literary imagination also drove his insatiable ambition, and he used it (often successfully) to dazzle voters and beguile other politicians. It was the only road to power that was open to him. As he put it in Vivian Grey, “to enter into high society, a man must either have blood, a million, or a genius” (17). Lacking the first two, Disraeli brashly insisted that he possessed the third in abundance, until the Tory party was reluctantly forced to concede the point.

There are gaps in this biography, and the lines it tries to draw between Disraeli's art and politics do not always connect. O'Kell skips over his childhood, a mistake in an intensely psychological biography of a self-described psychological novelist. The narrative starts in 1825 with his involvement with the Representative, a daily paper that competed (briefly and catastrophically) with the Times. When O'Kell reaches Tancred (1847), the biography is two-thirds finished. That does not leave much space for the main phase of Disraeli's political career, and in this section the literary side of O'Kell's analysis fades out.

So were Disraeli's novels anything more than campaign literature? Was he a pure adventurer, or was there some consistent principle behind his political machinations? O'Kell struggles to resolve that question throughout the book. Ultimately, he resorts to the psychological theories of Harold Lasswell, who argued that politicians never let go of the private selfish motives of their youth, but simply relabel them “public interests.” Disraeli effected that displacement in his novels, which can be read as elaborately crafted rationalizations of his ambitions and maneuverings. He fashioned himself a romantic, the successor to Byron and Shelley, though to his enemies he was insincerely melodramatic. And after all, what was Victorian melodrama but third-rate romanticism?