Coningsby

by Benjamin Disraeli

Overview

Disraeli included schoolboy romantic friendships in several of his novels, including Contarini Fleming, in which the title character, who appears to be Disraeli, falls in love with a boy named Musaeus: "It seemed to me that I never beheld so lovely and so pensive a countenance. His face was quite oval, his eyes deep blue: his rich brown curls clustered in hyacinthine grace upon the delicate rose of his downy cheek, and shaded the light blue veins of his clear white forehead. I beheld him: I loved him. My friendship was a passion." He repeats that thought in this passage from Coningsby

At school, friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after-life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and what devotion; what illimitable confidence, infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future; what bitter estrangements and what melting reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating explanations, passionate correspondence; what insane sensitiveness, and what frantic sensibility; what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul are confined in that simple phrase, a schoolboy's friendship.

Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative. watersgreen.wixsite.com/watersgreenhouse

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798765551684
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	04/03/2022
Pages:	524
Sales rank:	693,902
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.17(d)

About the Author

Disraeli was one of Britain’s more interesting prime ministers. Besides his career in Conservative Party politics, he was a writer credited with inventing the political novel. At school, he succumbed to the romantic friendships common among English school boys. He explains the phenomenon quite well himself in the passage below. Biographers have not quite known how to describe his adult sexuality. His strongest relationships appear to have been with men—not uncommon in his day--but he also found company with older women rather than women his own age, and he married late. Early biographers tried to explain his curious sexuality by noting that he was “partly oriental,” referring to his Jewish ethnicity (though when it came to religion, he was an Anglican). One biographer, Lord Blake, said he was something like Oscar Wilde but didn’t elaborate. Evidence of a possible homosexual nature occurs frequently in his writing. He refers often to gay figures from antiquity and the Renaissance, and when it came to writers from his own time, he preferred Lord Byron, who was widely regarded as a sexual outlaw in that era due in part to his love poems for adolescent boys. Notes Disraeli made to himself have survived in which he made lists of “heroes averse to women.” One can be excused for wondering if this is something a heterosexual man would do.
Disraeli included schoolboy romantic friendships in several of his novels, including Contarini Fleming, in which the title character, who appears to be Disraeli, falls in love with a boy named Musaeus: “It seemed to me that I never beheld so lovely and so pensive a countenance. His face was quite oval, his eyes deep blue: his rich brown curls clustered in hyacinthine grace upon the delicate rose of his downy cheek, and shaded the light blue veins of his clear white forehead. I beheld him: I loved him. My friendship was a passion."