SOURCE: "The Autobiographical Nature of Disraeli's Early Fiction," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 3, December, 1976, pp. 253-84.

In the essay that follows, O'Kell discusses how Disraeli's early novels reflect his attempt to forge a public identity. According to O'Kell, these early works represent Disraeli's struggle to combine a desire for public recognition with an acute sense of his marginalization as a writer of Jewish descent.

Extant biographical material suggests that the young Disraeli held two opposing senses of himself that were manifested in contradictory desires for recognition of very different sorts. Although he gloried in the ambitious egotism of his own genius and constantly sought expedient means of demonstrating its power in the pursuit of "success," Disraeli also clung to a sense of the innate superiority of another identity, one related to an awareness of his alien Jewish heritage and a need to claim an altruistic innocence or "purity" of...