SOURCE: "Behind Sybil's Veil: Disraeli's Mix of Ideological Messages," Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 4, December, 1988, pp. 321-41.

In the following essay, Handwerk analyzes Disraeli's rhetorical and political aims in Sybil, contending that despite the tension among the various strands of the novel, Disraeli actually put forward a coherent ideology.

The status accorded Benjamin Disraeli's fiction has begun to shift significantly of late as critics have started to reestimate the interest and complexity of his novels. Those texts were long considered to be of secondary or merely historical value as novels of ideas whose aesthetic possibilities fell prey to their all-too-blatant (and often idiosyncratic or hazy) polemical political intentions. More recent readings, by critics such as Patrick Brantlinger, Catherine Gallagher, and Rosemarie Bodenheimer, have brought the kind of sophisticated attention to these texts that allows us to recognize the intricate, often ironic ideological structures of Disraeli's narratives.¹

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