The Lives They Lived: 01-07-01: Barbara Cartland, b. 1901; She Spoke Volumes
Barbara Cartland was a romance novelist. She was the undisputed queen of the genre, the regent before whom all other pretenders must bow. In her 98 years on earth, Dame Barbara produced more than 700 romance novels. She wrote about only one topic: love. For instance, 'The Cave of Love,' 'The Devil in Love,' 'Love Is Innocent,' 'Love Is Dangerous,' 'Love Is a Maze' and even 'Love Is Contraband.'
I spent 1981 borrowing about a dozen Cartland novels a week from the local library. For me, her stories were a lifeline toward the impossible, the world as an enchanting adventure, despite my grim personal reality. (Namely, that I was in the sixth grade. Enough said.) She promised that the course of true love cannot be quelled by the forces of familial disapproval, societal prejudice, age difference or frank reality. If your love is destined, Dame Barbara decreed, then you shall find him. And she wasn't stingy with the adverbs either. As she wrote in 'Fire in the Blood,' 'All she knew was that she was close against him and he was kissing her wildly, passionately, demandingly and the world stood still.' Virginal girls were always swept off their feet by surprisingly muscular men in uniform, and there was no sex until marriage, and then it was 'all very wonderful and the moon beams.'
She churned out these novels at a feverish pace. She sold close to one billion volumes in her life. She never touched a typewriter but dictated the books to her secretaries, to the tune of 7,000 words a day. While she 'wrote,' she cuddled up with her Pekingese and her hot-water bottle. You could say that Dame Barbara wore cashmere blinders to the world. She passed her 98 years as much like a character in her novels as she could manage, dressing in pink and being chauffeured about in a white Rolls-Royce and falling in love with dukes. She did not concern herself with the unpleasantries of her century, like feminism (she felt it was 'bad manners' to cook breakfast for one's husband without wearing lipstick and a nice dress) or war (once suggesting that English tourists not cause a rude fuss in Germany by 'making loud asides about the Nazi regime'). She lived a long life, even outlasting her tragic step-granddaughter Diana, Princess of Wales. Sure, she got daffier as she aged. She once claimed to have known Winston Churchill back when he was a little boy, which would have been in the 1870's, but whatever -- the point was, she felt that she had known a better time, when 'if a man always said good morning and hello and what have you, people would say when he died that he was a great gentleman.'
Barbara Cartland's talent was not as a writer, heaven knows, but as a sincere advocate of those feathery ideals that most of us abandon in our youth. She managed to live through the ugliest century of world history as though she were an eternal 11-year-old girl, still convinced that virtue reigns supreme and that beauty is its own reward and that, in the end, love will always turn sorrow to happiness. Despite any cold evidence to the contrary, she believed all this. She believed it stubbornly.
Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of 'Stern Men,' a novel, and a writer at large for GQ.