Barbara Cartland

Or, the Grand Dame of Gateway Romances

If marihuana is commonly characterized as a gateway drug (even if, perhaps, alcohol or tobacco might be more realistically designated for the role) then Barbara Cartland has got to be the analogous first taste for many romance readers. I admit to having read dozens of her books, especially some of the older ones, to the point that, even twenty years later I can recall some of the titles---Out Of Reach, for example. (Hated that one. Now, the ones I do like, I can't recall.) Halo for the Devil was her version of the Heyer story These Old Shades I believe, and possibly it was Never Laugh at Love (I believe) which I thought had the most interesting plot device, only to discover it again in Heyer's The Convenient Marriage.

I actually have rather fond memories of all those books, even the ones churned out once a month: I liked the cover artist, whose loose painterly style over drawings had a freshness and freedom to it that I thought perfectly reflected the rapidly written, frothy stories, over which my father unmercifully teased his daughter, ``...and he kissed her rose-tipped tip tilted breasts---'' ``Da-a-a-a--a-a-a-d!!!'' though he did try to assauge my feelings by saying, on several occasions that while good novelists were a dime a dozen, and even great ones weren't out of the uncommon way, successful hacks---his favorite example was Mickey Spillane---were rara aves indeed, and that Cartland's gift was an extraordinarily unusual one.

It's pretty obvious that anyone churning books out thirteen times a year (her record during my high school years, and my early 20s, when I was an active fan) takes plots wherever she can find them, and I suspect she cannibalized all the resources, including her older books, available to her. Despite the books' many flaws, I think they appealed to me because the heroines often had occupations (frequently learned from their fathers), which, for the time I was reading the stories, was rather radical for historical romances; also there was none of that tiresome raping and near-raping by the male protagonists that tended to characterize some of long historicals of the era. And Cartland took pity on us historical know nothings, and actually put the date at the beginning of each book. I haven't identified the ultimate source of the Indian Maharani's marital instructions to the innocent English wife, which I believe I encountered The Bored Bridegroom set in 1804. The Bantam Barbara Cartland Library 6. NY: Bantam Books, 1974 (However much I didn't care for the plot device, it certainly stuck in my mind.)

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a list of her plot synopses, or a picture of the cover, so I may be misremembering which book it was---it was one of the earlier ones, though, and the insterested reader can check out Cartland's oevre at Cathy Drecker's excellent site.

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Sylvus Tarn

Last modified: Mon Sep 14 22:53:21 EDT 1998