Barbara Cartland
Show Notes
If you were to ask someone in the 20th century what a romance novelist looked like, they’d likely have visions of pink chiffon, bright blue eyeshadow, false eyelashes, and excessive costume jewelry thanks to one woman: Barbara Cartland, who was dubbed by the Romantic Times as the “Queen of Romance.” Cartland was larger than life, but like most outsized figures, the “self-publicizing juggernaut’ was also very controversial. From the 1920s until her death in the year 2000 she wrote over 700 novels, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Strap in as our resident himbo takes Emma and Beth through the highs and lows of Cartland’s life.
Books Referenced
Barbara Cartland: Crusader in Pink by Henry Cloud
Barbara Cartland: An Authorised Biography by Gwen Robyns
The Sheik by E.M. Hull
Jigsaw by Barbara Cartland
We Danced All Night by Barbara Cartland
The Glamour Boys: The Secret Story of the Rebels who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler by Chris Bryant
These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester
A Hazard of Hearts by Barbara Cartland
Love’s Leading Ladies by Kathryn Falk
The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance by Paul Grescoe
Works Cited:
“At 71, Barbara Cartland Is Still a Crusader”
Studs Terkel Interviews Barbara Cartland March 5, 1970
In the Psychiatrist's Chair with Dr Anthony Clare
“Barbara Cartland stole plots, rival author alleged in furious letters”
“Plagiarism in Regency Romance”
Jackie Collins vs Barbara Cartland
“Tickled pink - Cartland clothes auction sale fulfils novelist's last wish”
“Romance Authors have a Queen for 3 Days”
The Glamour Boys: gay MPs who gave early warning of Nazi threat
Transcript
Chels
Welcome to Reformed Rakes, a historical romance podcast that has had 49 proposals of marriage. My name is Chels. I'm the writer of the romance Substack the Loose Cravat, a book collector and a book talker under the username Chels_ebooks.
Emma
I'm Emma, a law librarian writing about justice and romance at the Substack, Restorative Romance.
Beth
I'm Beth and I'm on BookTok under the name bethhaymondreads.
Chels
If you were to ask someone in the 20th century what a romance novelist looked like, they'd likely have visions of pink chifon, bright blue eye shadow, false eyelashes, and excessive costume jewelry, thanks to one woman, Barbara Cartland, who was dubbed by The Romantic Times as the Queen of Romance.
Chels
Cartland was larger than life, but like most outsized figures, the quote self publicizing juggernaut was also very controversial. In her Telegraph obituary, they called her "the most reliable sound bite artist of her times." Though many of her readers are women, Barbara Cartland has never liked nor ever will like women in general, Gwen Robbins wrote in Barbara's 1984 authorized biography stating that, quote, she was the prototype of the 300 odd virgins she was to create in her novels in years to come. Virgins, not heroines. At times, Cartland referred to the women she wrote as Cinderellas, but they were always virginal, typically coupled with a more stern, dark haired man. From the 1920s until her death in the year 2000, she wrote over 700 novels, breaking records for both sales and speed. Her favorite period to write were 19th century historical romances, but as a self-proclaimed history buff, she didn't limit herself to settings in England.
Chels
She was outspoken about public health, premarital sex, education, and above all else, herself. A public figure for most of her life, Barbara Cartland was a gossip column, radio, and talk show staple. She was sometimes caught in a baby blue frock, but for the most part, Barbara Cartland only wore pink, saying she was inspired by the Pink Walls and King Tut's tomb when she visited in the 1920s, saying, I was so impressed that I vow to wear it for the rest of my life. In her later years with changing societal mores, people would wonder at Cartland's continued relevancy. But while her sales ebbed and flowed, she always had her devoted readers. Before writing this episode, I thought I knew a lot about Barbara Cartland, and while perhaps I knew more than most, I was barely scratching the surface. Today's episode is a wild ride, so buckle in, virgins.
Chels
So I guess before we get started, I wanted to ask you guys, what do you know about Barbara Cartland? Maybe before I started sending you a million text this week.
Beth
I literally knew nothing about Barbara Cartland, but then that has changed rapidly.
Emma
I knew she had beef with people. I think I knew that from one of your TikToks early, maybe when you were talking about her. I also knew that I had started one of her books and immediately dropped it. I was like, this is so boring and bad. It was published in an anthology that I had gotten. That was five Barbara Cartland novels that were all together. I picked it up at a library book sale, started it. It was before I realized that I much prefer reading trade paperback shaped books. So that was a sensory experience that I didn't enjoy, but I didn't like the book that I had read and got rid of the book. So that was pretty much all I knew about her. I think I knew what she looked like, which is a big part of her that sounds like surface level.
Chels
It is a huge part.
Emma
What she looks like is a huge part of Cartlands's mythology. So I knew I had an image of what she looked like.
Beth
Yeah, it's a very striking appearance.
Chels
Yeah, very pink. Okay, well, we're going to learn a lot more today. Yes. Okay, so I'm going to back up over a century. So Barbara Cartland was born in 1901, and she's a direct descendant of what Gwen Robbins calls in her biography, quote, The oldest Saxon family in existence. So it's tracing back to Thomas Descovenhole, High Sheriff of Deventer in 1032, which is 32 years before the Norman conquest, so quite old. So even with this history, there is an attempt to bootstrap her legacy. So this is from Henry Cloud's Barbara Cartland, Crusader in Pink. She finds such connections like the dukes and marquises, she writes about quote very romantic, but her immediate path lies not with the upper aristocracy. Like many writers of her period, she comes from the most fertile of imaginative seed beds, the dispossessed Edwardian gentry. I think that's the funniest phrase I've ever heard. So the dispossessed part is her paternal grandfather. So we can back up to that level. So Cartland's Camfield estate, she bought it in the 1950s, and it used to be owned by Beatrix Potter, but it has statues of her maternal grandparents. So her paternal grandparents are the ones that lost the money.
Chels
But she's much more interested in the history of her maternal grandparents, judging by the amount of space that they take up in her biographies. So her maternal grandfather is Colonel Scobell. So he was a Victorian man, and Gwen Robbins called him an explorer, an adventurer. So he was the first man to climb Mont Blanc. He sounds like a jerk. In a weird but revealing moment, Robbins described him as having sax and blue eyes and a fine crop of curly hair. But she inexplicably quotes him as saying that he slept with women of every nationality in the world, and the Japanese are much the best.
Beth
Yikes!
Emma
This is wild to be your granddaughter's biography. Someone was like, We're going to say three things about her grandfather, and this is one fo them.
Beth
Oh, God. Yeah.
Chels
It's so telling. I think we'll circle back to this over and over again, but something that I think a lot about Barbara Cartland is just the amount of, I don't know what the right word is, excusing, apologetic. The way that she treats the men in her life is so telling.
Beth
She gives them a pass. She's like, Oh, yeah, they had this going for them. This was hard for them. And then we will see how she treats her women relatives.
Chels
Yeah, we'll see, won't we? Yeah. But he's dashing. In her mind, he's very dashing. So he gets to take up the space. So Scobell married Cartland's grandmother, Edith. And Edith's mother was a very famously petite heiress named Marianne Hamilton. Marianne had seven daughters before she died in her late 20s, and Edith was the sixth daughter. So they split the fortune among all of the daughters. Robbins spends a lot of time comparing and contrasting the stature of Marianne and her daughter, Edith. I think this is because Barbara Cartland is dictating this right to Robbins. Edith has none of her mother's delicacy. That's something that comes up a lot, like who has the ankles, who is small? Who is tiny? That is a really big concern for this particular biography.
Chels
But Edith had charm and wit. And apparently, one of her favorite sayings was, All men are polygamous at heart, which I think is something that someone who eventually married George Scobell would say. It's more sad than anything. George was a neglectful husband to Edith, so he had a really, really nasty temper. So when Edith had a daughter, he was enraged, like he was so angry. And so then when she had three daughters, he was near apoplectic.
Chels
And that third daughter, Mary Hamilton, was nicknamed Polly. And Polly was Barbara Cartland's mother. So George eventually got the son that he wanted, who went on to become Major General Sir John Scobell, who rose to prominence during the First World War and was continuously lauded and celebrated until his death in the 1940s. I want to circle back to George, though, and particularly what Barbara Cartland thought about her grandfather, George. Beth, can you read this quote from Gwen Robbins book?
Beth
Though Barbara is the first to admit that tolerance is not one of her strongest points, she does not have George Scobell's chronic bad temper, which led him into tyrannical rages. Poor Edith has suffered greatly under these outbursts, and the marriage, especially in the beginning, was often stormy. Larger than life in every way, George Scobell found it impossible to accept the restrictions of Victorian family life. Being a man of strong character, he rebelled in the only way he knew much to Edith's distress. Her own brothers were so different, charming, well-mannered, and considerate to women. George Scobell's thunderous moods, which were ricocheted round the house like a tempest, were, according to Barbara, merely an outlet for something far deeper. She wrote of him, He wanted beauty, the beauty he sought among old masters and young mistresses. He enjoyed physical danger and mental achievement. Trivialities put him into a rage against the conventional security of the English landscape. Only the broad horizons, the snow-capped mountains against a foreign sky, tempestuous seas, and strange unknown nationalities could assuage some aching need within himself.
Chels
So what do you think of that?
Beth
We were talking about? It's just like, he sounds abusive, honestly, but she's just like, Oh, he just was too big for this life, for this conventional life. Oh, my goodness.
Emma
And the thing that would cure his temper is imperialism. If only he had the money to go conquer someone, we wouldn't have to be dealing with his bad temper. He would be having this outlet of being able to be an adventurer. I think she's already envisioning him as a pirate king, or, I imagine him being on a ship during a war, sending him out in these ways. You can see that this language is... Also this language, it sounds like she's describing a romance novel hero in a lot of ways that we want him to be outside of society. But however, you live in a society, George. You can't act like this.
Emma
What really stuck out to me, too, is that Robbins says, poor Edith suffered greatly under these outbursts. So it's like poor, Edith, put upon. The sympathy is an ostensibly is with her, but it's not really because it's just like, Oh, this woman does not know how to handle this whirlwind of a man. This is a recurring theme in Barbara Cartland's life. You were right, Beth. So George Scobell was abusive. He was very temperamental. And there's this anecdote that just really stressed me out. It upset me where he cropped all of his daughter's hair short to save money. But there's no record of there being money trouble at the time. So I don't think that he was actually doing saving money on haircuts. I think that he was just being a jerk. He was also frequently heard to bemoan, Why should I be blessed with such a damned, ugly daughters? The Lord only knows. He didn't want... He didn't really want daughters.
Beth
He's the guy that you do a gender reveal party, and when it would be pink, he would be throwing stuff. Oh, my goodness. I think.
Emma
This happens a lot in history, too, where it's like if a man marries a hot heiress and then he has daughters that he finds not as beautiful, or he's like, Why aren't you beautiful? It's like, Where do you think that comes from, my dude? Yeah.
Beth
If you're married someone beautiful...
Emma
Your daughters are not lookers and you have to find other qualities in them. It's like, there are only two people involved here. It's coming from you. I think it's probably George's fault that even if they are less attractive, which who knows? Maybe he's just being a dick.
Beth
Very probable.
Chels
Yeah, he definitely was. So apparently the cropped hair didn't look too bad on Polly as it, quote, enhanced her gamine qualities. So she was actually a little bit of a hoyden and apparently, George's favorite child. So she was very vivacious and very popular. And then she later went on to marry Barbara Cartland's father, Bertram Cartland or Bertie. And so Bertie's father, James Cartland, opened a brass factory during the Industrial Revolution. So he was a very wealthy man, and he was twice offered a baronetcy, but he declined because apparently he liked the title Esquire better, which I think is funny. I don't know. If you're a baronet, are you a sir?
Emma
He's a lawyer. Yes, sir would be a baronet as an Esquire. I'm an Esquire, technically.
Chels
You should use that, Emma. Yeah, that's cool.
Emma
I could sign things as esquire. It's like if you're barred, you get to use... I don't know how it works in England. Oh, right. I could sign things as esquire if I wanted to because I am technically an attorney.
Chels
Yeah, okay. I need more written letters from you, stat. Right.
Chels
So James Cartland, Barbara Cartland's paternal grandfather is where that dispossessed, Edwardian, gentry moniker comes into play. So there was a financial slump in 1902 when Barbara was a toddler, and the bank called in the 250,000 pounds that they loaned to James Cartland for the Fishgarn Railway. The bank was demanding this money in cash, and James actually ended up shooting himself shortly after this really devastating financial news. Bertie and Polly were living at an estate named Bowbrook at the time, and they had to evacuate because they didn't have the title to it. They thought that they did. But upon James' death, they realized that they didn't actually own it. They were also spending very frivolously beforehand and had their own personal debts. They were doing that thing that aristocrats and historical romance do where they live on credit. But when news got out that they were bankrupt, suddenly everybody wanted them to pay up. There's this quote from Polly that is often repeated by the Cartland clan, Poor, I may be, but common, I am not. So I like that this is their mantra because poor is very subjective here. So I guess we're going to talk about how much money they had and put it into context.
Chels
So Polly and Bertie, neither of them worked at the time, and they still had 300 pound income a year. So it's 200 pounds a year that Bertie got from Mrs. Cartland, and 100 a year that George Scobell gave Polly annually. Some online calculators put that at around 35,000 pounds annually in 2017's money. So I'm not entirely sure how accurate that is. But A, it's not nothing. And B, I suspect that it's worth more than that because Bertie and Polly were still able to keep two servants, a nurse for Barbara and a maid of all work. The money, I think that they were probably still firmly middle class based on the fact they were able to have two servants with them.
Beth
I think it's hard to match up with how far money you went in the past compared to now because things are worth different. Labor is much cheaper back at that time, but now labor is much more expensive. So to have someone who's doing work for you, a large chunk of your income would be going to them.
But how can we put a price on the fact that they had these servants and a nurse doing work for them that freed them up to do other things? It's hard to be like, Oh, yeah, that's worth X amount of dollars. Or did they have access to land? What access did they have to transportation? All these things is just very difficult to put money on and then translate it into today's dollars.
Emma
Yeah. And it seems like the fall parallels that phrase dispossessed, Edwardian gentry, that the distinction goes from that they were in a house that they thought they owned. And now I presume that they're probably renting a space that's probably nice enough to have three servants or four servants, but they're not owning it anymore. So it's like the dispossession has to do with their no longer landed, and that seems to be in line with the fall that's happening here. It's also one of those things like you can make a lot of if they're working, you have 300 pounds a year, you can work, you can make money, but it's very hard to go the other direction. It's hard to get land back, especially in England. That's the the poorness that they're poor gentry, but now they're not even gentry because they're not owning land. They've lost that.
Chels
Right. And Polly did her best to keep up appearances and keep her family in those same social circles. I think that's also where a lot of their privilege came from being in those circles. Because the story of Barbara Cartland is not necessarily being an extremely wealthy woman. At any point in time, I can't tell you how much money that she had, but a lot of it is just her connections, the people that she knows. And that's something that she did get from being related to and from financiers and from being in these elite circles.
Beth
You said something earlier about there's this, I don't know who's trying to bootstrap her legacy. It's people around her that are like, Hey, Barbara, that's not really going to resonate with readers. Let's maybe talk about how hard you worked and stuff. But that's very common, especially with celebrities now who will grow up rich, and then you read biographies of them, and will conveniently not talk about the private schools they went to and that their parent was a VP at company and maybe helped them out with the connection or even just having the space to work on their craft and not worry about rent like other people. So I find it's interesting. Even with Barbara Cartland, it's been a narrative for a long time to make celebrities a little bit more approachable or authors and not be like, Yeah, she just conveniently knew someone. That's why she got published. It's so funny.
Chels
Because I was just thinking about this, too, because we just watched the Red, White, Royal Blue movie last night. And so something that I remember, I guess it's also in the book, too, but Alex, one of the main characters is the President's son. And he's contrasting himself to Prince Henry from England. And he keeps saying like, Oh, I'm working class. I'm from working class. And it's like, You're not working class. Nobody goes from being working class to a President's son directly. There's a lot of steps. There's a lot of something in there. And then sure enough, every house, every whatever that they go to, I don't know. Sometimes I wonder what people think working class is.
Emma
Yeah. I think it's also hard. This is the thing I struggle with, because me as a historical romance novel reader of books mostly said in England is like, I understand the British class system. I've read enough things about it. I get that it is different, but it is hard to grasp the meaning of class and the lack of mobility that happens there. I thought about this with the actress, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a show writer of Fleabag. People are always revealing that Phoebe Waller-Bridge is actually very wealthy. But if you watch Fleabag, there's also signals of wealth in her family in Fleabag. But an American viewer of Fleabag watches the character Fleabag and thinks she's working class because she lives in a rundown apartment. She has her little guinea pig cafe. But those are her things that she's doing. While her father has lots of money that she will eventually have. Her father owns a house. Her father is able to gift her all these things and pays for her therapy. There are all these signals of where Fleabag is in it, but I don't think that it's false for her to have this working class looking life.
Emma
I think that is something that is hard to grasp as an American. This money could be coming to people in a way in England that is confusing to people. I think Red, White and Blue seems to be dealing with that a little bit, where it's like you think you're working class in America and then there are people who are maybe have less money with the Prince, has more money. But there are people who have less money in England but aren't working class. And it's just strange. It's one of those things I get confused on.
Beth
Yeah, it's very confusing, I think.
Chels
Who knows how much money anyone has to have? But Polly was an expert at keeping up appearances. If they needed to go somewhere, she would rent conveyance to make them look like they had a certain amount of wealth. But she could not afford a governess, and so she had to share with other families. So then Barbara was sent to some friends with Bath, and then she went to Somerset. So it was like a landed, gentry, educational ride share system that they had going on there. Barbara is obsessed with the physicality and beauty. And so there's this point where she's a young teen where she's just like, Oh, no, I'm hideous. This is the worst thing that's ever happening to me, which is very relatable. I think that's a very 13-year-old thing to happen. But then, of course, she grows into herself. She grows into her ankles. Having small ankles is... I didn't realize how significant that was for a lot of people. I have other things that I focus on. I've never even thought about my ankles, but I've been hearing a lot about ankles in my Facebook. But yeah, she's considered quite a beauty.
Chels
So she had very, very green eyes. She said people would call them Barbara's Headlights. I don't know who called them that.
Emma
That's not the part of the body that I've ever heard described as headlights, but I can't remember.
Chels
Right. Maybe people were talking-
Emma
There is another one that I was like, I've never heard it described as someone's eyes. Yeah.
Chels
Maybe people were being really raunchy with Barbara, and she just didn't get it out yet.
Emma
She should read more Jackie Collins books. I know.
Chels
So Polly really struggled to keep Bertie occupied. So Bertie is not employed at this time. He'd never been employed. But he was not really wealthy enough for his wealthy man hobbies, his wealthy boy whims. Well, he couldn't really keep up with that. So Polly's like, I've got to keep him distracted. I can't have him trying to keep up with all of these people that he cannot financially keep up with. He drank too much. And so Polly had to steer him around until 1911. And that's when he became the Provisional Secretary of the Primrose League, which was his conservative club. So he was apparently a very good public speaker. And Polly hoped that he would later become a member of Parliament. This didn't happen for Bertie, but it did for Barbara's brother, Ronald, who we'll definitely talk about more later. So when World War I broke out, Bertie became a soldier, and that did give him some more direction. But I suppose land and gentry habits die hard because when he was stationed at Flanders, he mailed back his laundry so that Polly could wash it, and then she would mail it back to him. That's the craziest thing I think I've ever read.
Beth
Yeah.
Emma
Talk about, Help me budget. My family is dying. Why are they paying for that postage?
Chels
It's 4,000 candles. So Bertie really wanted distinction in the war, like some type of medal, but that never came. He was eventually killed in the Battle of Messines. So Polly lost her husband, so she's raising. She has Barbara, she has Ronald, and she has her youngest son, Anthony. So she's continuing to try to keep up appearances, but now she's fully a single parent. At 18, Barbara discovered a lending library and with it her interest in romantic literature that echoed the gender roles that she and her family prized above all else. So particularly the works of Ethel M. Del, who loved a strong, silent man and like a soft, feminine woman paired together and her colonialist stories set in India, and Eleanor Glenn, who's a novelist who is behind the term it-girl. Lastly, Cartland was also influenced by E. M. Hull's The Sheik. I haven't read The Sheik, but I do know it by both its title and reputation, so it's likely very racially troubling like Dell's work. But something that's odd to me is that The Sheik is thought to be a precursor to the Bodice Rappers of the 1970s. And so those are the same books that Barbara Cartland would later call Soft Porn.
Emma
I have read The Sheik. It is racially troubling, you are correct? The stuff happens.
Emma
On very off page. The thing that is different, I think, compared to Bodice Rippers. There's definitely a sexual assault scene, but there's not a whole lot of in between that and the falling in love. It's more like a ravishment where the ravishment leads directly to... It's like a seduction, a seduction through force. I feel like a lot of bodice rippers, even early ones, are structured as there's a rape and then something has to be fixed. The heroine has to then fall in love. In the Sheik, it happens pretty immediately, and so it's structured a little bit differently. But you're right, racially troubling is one way to put it. It's rough. But yeah, I actually feel like Barbara Cartland, it also happens off page.
Chels
Maybe that's why she was okay with it.
Emma
I feel like maybe she would be more okay with it because it happens off page. It's not scintillating at all.
Chels
Yeah, I don't think Barbara Cartland particularly cared about racism. What I thought was interesting is a lot of her recorded interviews, like what you see on video are from the 1980s. So you get a lot of Barbara Cartland talking about Bodice Rippers or talking about sexually explicit material like Jackie Collins, which we'll talk about later. She's very much against. And so for the Sheik to be a precursor to some of those works, which is interesting, like how people take different things from the same work. So before cars were a thing, people used to go to Stanhope Gate at Hyde Park to gather after church. It was called Church Parade. And Barbara, who, as we're frequently told now, very attractive, would hope for an introduction to her friends, brothers. So she had 49 proposals of marriage before she accepted her first proposal by a man named Dick Usher. And this was very short lived. So she apparently acquired what sex was after she became engaged, she asked her mom. And the whole sordid affair, the idea of it really put her off. So she was a teenager at the time, but nobody had ever spoken with her about that.
Chels
She had never had a conversation with Polly. Because of that, she ended up breaking off her engagement because she didn't want to have sex with Dick Usher. But she did continue to date quite a lot. She was very popular. And so she had a way that she would track the men that were interested in her. So this is another quote from Gwen Robbins book. I guess I'll have you read this, Emma.
Emma
As the beaux queued up, and they did, Barbara had her own system of rating them. Four star, met at dinner and dancing. Three star was a luncheon date. Two star tea, preferably at The Ritz. And one star was delighted to be allowed to drive her in his car to have a meal with someone else. Oh, my God.
Chels
One star is rough.
Emma
I'm the only single rake on the podcast. I feel like maybe I need to start employing this.
Beth
A rating system for your date.A
Emma
rating system for the when I go on dates. That like, one star, you're taking me on a date with someone else. I also liked that the Ritz is two stars. How does the Ritz feel about this? That really, that chuffed me.
Chels
Yeah. So yeah, very popular, very, very busy. So this is a complete side note. I didn't really know where to fit this in, but I did want to talk about this. So Barbara Cartland was friends with Lord Mountbatten for a very long time. They had a decades long relationship with him. And so you might know Lord Mountbatten, he was a mentor to King Charles. He was murdered by the IRA in the 1980s. So Barbara Cartland and Mountbatten, their relationship seems like... I might be reading a little bit into it, but it seems like there's a want of something romantic there just because Cartland stresses that Mountbatten ended up marrying Edwina Ashley, who looks a lot like Barbara Cartland, which is one of the first out of at least two times where someone that she knows married someone who was a Barbara Cartland lookalike, according to Barbara Cartland.
Beth
Yeah, I was going to say according to Barbara Cartland.
Chels
According to Barbara Cartland. Mountbatten also bought her... So she had a lot of dogs. She had those pekingese. They're the tiny, floofy white dogs. But Mountbatten bought her a black Labrador. So he gave her a completely different type of dog. They also wrote a book together. It was called Love at the Helm. He would supply the naval history, and then she would write the romance. She was apparently very devastated when he died. This is just a side, but it's hard to fit in different pieces of who Barbara Cartland was in an organic way just because there's so much information. But backing up to her novel writing. So in 1920, Cartland decided to write a novel to run up her brother, Ronald, who announced that he was going to write the perfect essay. So she's like, I'm going to write the perfect novel. So after she started writing, her mom, Polly, asked the poet, Dick Coventry, who had aristocratic connections, he was a cousin to Lord Coventry, to read some chapters for a book. And then he was like, You have to finish this. So then a few months later, she finished her first book called Jigsaw.
Chels
Jigsaw was published. Cartland was in her early 20s, and that's when she becomes a public figure. So while she was still working on Jigsaw, she was also to feed five shillings a paragraph to feed gossip to The Daily Express. So she continued to do this for many years. And later, she ended up earning about two pounds a paragraph for her work, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, all The Dailies. She didn't go into the offices and she wanted to remain anonymous. And she said she did this to avoid being fawned over and invited to parties as press. What do you think of that? I don't really buy that reasoning. Well, I feel like if.
Beth
She's feeding gossip and then she goes into the daily mirror or someone sees her, what does that tip people off?
Emma
I don't know. Don't tell Barbara anything. Yeah, why.
Beth
Would you tell Barbara if you knew? This is also a.
Emma
Very gauche behavior to cop to. If you're moving in, in, aristocratic circles, I'm thinking she's like the Food God. You know the food god?
Chels
Yeah.
Beth
I don't!
Emma
He's a hanger on with the Kardashians. Oh, okay. But his name is Jonathan Chabon, I think. But he's notorious as the feeder to the tabloids for information about the Kardashians. They tolerate him for some reason. But he's also always trying to be famous on his own accord, separate from the Kardashians. But he's into... He's a foodie, but in a extravagent way. He's always eating things covered in gold is what I associate him with. But I feel like Barbara Cartland is doing Food God gossip, where it's like, that's so embarrassing. If you're hanging out with the Lord Mountbatten, it's like they don't care about you, they care about him. And again, I feel like the person who's feeding gossip to daily newspapers, it's always reviled. You tolerate them because sometimes you want gossip to go to the newspapers if you're particularly famous.
Beth
It's like the devil you know, so you can maybe think a little bit.
Chels
Oh, my God. Barbara Cartland. Food God. So one day, Barbara Cartland receives a summons from Lord Beaverbrook, and he's the owner of The Express. So Beaverbrook was a wealthy Canadian British newspaperman who was a strong conservative force in British politics in the 1920s. I'm going to have Beth read you this quote as our resident Canadian.
Beth
Yeah, that literally was the name of my high school, Lord Beaverbrook, which tracks because I'm from a conservative province. Okay. To editors and reporters who worked on The Express Group, a summons to see the beaver was like a direct missive from the arched angel or the devil. Strong men were known to tremble before entering his presence, he could reduce intelligent editors to blithering idiots with the sadistic humor. In her naivety, Barbara was totally unaware of this and effervest at their first meeting, she found him omnipotent, enigmatic, with a strong dynamic vitality. I feel like this track is our best. Yeah, I was like... Yeah, anyway.
Chels
So he, of course, fell in love with Barbara. He was married and twice her age, but he did offer to make her his mistress. So that, of course, didn't happen. And the only thing that really came of that was that according to Barbara, he was very jealous when his friend James Dunn, who's another Canadian financier and self-made millionaire, proposed to her. Cartland declined that proposal. She thought he was too old and she didn't like that he was divorced. So it was through Lord Beaverbrook, though, that she made a lot of connections that will come to know Barbara Cartland for her. This is where she met Winston Churchill, Viscount Castleross and Sir James Dunn. Churchill would later get to know Cartland's brother, Ronald, while Ronald was in parliament. Beaverbrook served as a mentor to Cartland. So he offered to teach her how to write and he judiciously and personally edited her work. So you have to think about it. He was the head guy. He owned The Express. He was one of the great Fleet Street personalities, and she was a gossip columnist. That's an interesting relationship.
Emma
Yeah.
Chels
Beaverbrook and Cartland drifted apart. She said that he got a mild revenge on her by excluding mention of her and his gossip columns. But he kept publishing her work. I guess he was known to be vindictive, but she got off a little bit lightly. The word crusader comes up a lot for Cartland. She's definitely had a lot of causes of interest. When her brother became MP in Birmingham, she saw poverty for the first time in her life, and that seemed to have an effect on her. But I think crusader is a flattering term from Barbara Cartland's political life. A 1970s article from the New York Times entitled Barbara Cartland, still a crusader at '71, inaccurate credits her with wielding a trunchon against people attempting to move busses during the general strike of 1926. The opposite is actually true. The general strike of 1926 was to prevent wage reductions for coal miners who already had pretty abysmal working conditions. So it was a solidarity strike. A lot of strikers were in machinery or public transport. And even though over a million people went on strike, it was unsuccessful because the government had nine months to prepare for it, and they encouraged middle class people to, quote, volunteer or essentially scab for the empty position so that things could keep running.
Chels
Cartland and her friends were these people. She wrote about it in her book, We Danced All Night, which is about her adventures in the 1920s. She says, I got in touch with my friends and found that everybody was volunteering to help in any way they could and that centers had been set up in different parts of London where volunteers could apply. I discovered that my near center was at Hyde Park Corner. I didn't, of course, learn into later the reasons for the strike. What I did sense and what had been obvious from my brother's attitude was that the majority of Londoners resented being held to ransom by the strikers. And it was felt to be an adventure to fight back by carrying on as usual. And then later, what the strikers didn't envisage was the defense of solidarity of what they called the bourgeoisie. It was the Bulldog determination not to give in, which had not been known since the autumn of 1914.
Emma
So carrying on, as usual, is not scabbing. If you were just going about your normal life, you would not be taking on a volunteer position for someone who's striking, Barbara. She's like, I didn't know what was going on. It's like, well, okay. It seems like some cognitive dissonance about what she's blaming for her. I guess she wants to be on the right side of history in this retroactive application of her. But I was like, Does she think that being on the striker's side is the right side of history? She's so conservative. I don't know if she actually feels the need to edit herself.
Chels
Right. That's a great question. She knows that this is not a thing you should say. She had a lot of interviews about the strike in the 1970s because that's when her book about the 20s came out. So she was on Stud Terkel's radio program, and he was asking her about it. And he basically was like, Is this something that you regret? And she hedges a lot. She basically says that the miners didn't do a good job of saying why they were on strike. They didn't do a good job of communicating that. And that's a funny thing to say because a lot of newspapers were controlled by the government at the time. She says that they didn't do a good job of communicating, but if they had known, if they might have reacted differently. And so he asks her again, Knowing what you know now, would you have done something differently? And then she says, I did what I thought was right at the time, so no. I mean, you know. It seems.
Beth
Apart from the course that she's not self-reflecting in any way. Yeah. She's just basically like...
Chels
In her mind, I think that the strike went because they didn't strike well enough. I don't think that she has any concept of her actions as being something that she should have regret for because-.
Emma
Or perhaps one of the reasons why the strike went poorly.
Chels
Right, because nine months of preparation, because what happened basically is they were telling all of these young people. They were like, It is patriotic to scab. It is like, You don't want all of these bad things to happen. It's just so.
Emma
Interesting identifying with the bourgeoisie. I feel like that's the thing that is generally... It's so interesting that bourgeoisie is a phrase because it's like, Oh, people, when you're looking down, you call something bougie, but also when you're looking up, you're like, Oh, that's so bougie, because it's... bourgeoisie is bad. You don't want to be the bourgeoisie. And it seems like for a lot of her early life and her family's life, they're trying to distance themselves from the bourgeoisie. They're like, We're not the bourgeoisie, we're the landed gentry. But she's like, Oh, the solidarity of the bourgeoisie. And it's like, That's not the class solidarity that generally people are proud of.
Beth
She strikes me as someone who just is deeply proud of her history, loves her history, but knows it's not a good sell to the public. So I feel like lots of it is trying to walk that line of controlling the narrative of her family.
Chels
Yeah, and this is the thing too, that studs Terkel interview is probably one of the best Barbara Cartland interviews I've ever heard because he knows how to interject and repeat what she's saying back to her and make her clarify or acknowledge what she just said. Cartland was a very rapid speaker, so she tends to bowl over a lot of interviewers, which is why I think you get so much Barbara Cartland from Barbara Cartland's point of view because no one else can get a word in it otherwise. And another side note for here, there's so much about Barbara Cartland. This shouldn't be a side note. I think you could honestly do a whole episode on this. But she was a sportswoman, so she participated in a woman's car race in the '30s. And in 1931, she had a record breaking glider flight of 200 miles. So apparently at that time, most glider flights beforehand were very short. She wanted something very sustained. So she worked with two RAF officers to come up with the mechanics to achieve this. And she also during her flight, it was the first nail delivery flight because she had a nail bag with her.
Chels
So lots of record breaking, lots of firsts. She's a very historical person. She's had her hands everywhere. But we talked earlier about how she had 49 proposals of marriage. Let's talk about the 50th. That is her first husband, Alexander McCorquodale. McCorquodale was Scottish, and his family made their fortune as the largest printing group in the world. So when he proposed to Barbara, he promised to buy her house in Mayfair in Rolls-Royce. She married him in 1927, but it was a pretty troubled marriage. They amassed £17,000 in debt within their first year of marriage, the Rolls-Royce, the house in London, the rental in the Orkney Islands, and then their four servants. Apparently, according to Cartland later in life, she doesn't really say this in the early biographies that I read of her, but later in life, she says that he struggled with alcohol. They gave birth to Raine. You will probably know Raine as Princess Diana's stepmother, the same one that she pushed down the stairs.
Beth
The fun little side note. Fun side note.
Chels
That's where you probably know Raine. In the early 1930s, Cartland received letters with evidence that her husband was cheating on her with a woman named Eleanor Curtis. So she didn't want a divorce. She found the whole prospect humiliating. But Alexander apparently started having detectives follow her to find evidence that she was cheating on him. So she then took the letters to a solicitor because she said she had no choice. And then a very contentious divorce played out. So he stopped paying the household bills. So Barbara was once again in reduced financial straits. She said the whole McCorquodale clan turned on her as if she had done something wrong and so she felt very isolated. I find this very telling because Cartland is very anti-divorce. There are many times where she says that you need to take care of a man in order to keep him happy and that your husband's unhappiness is because of you. So there's this interview that Barbara Cartland did in 1991 with Dr. Anthony Clair on his popular BBC radio for show in the psychiatrist chair. I'm going to have you all reenact this. Emma, you're going to be Barbara. Okay.
Chels
Beth, you're going to be Dr. Anthony Clair. Okay. And go. When you.
Beth
Look at the misery and the diseases of the world, so to speak, are you saying that if blame is to be apportioned, women deserve more of it than men?
Emma
No, if blame is to be apportioned, it's women's lib. Women's lib has broken up the guidelines. If you marry someone you love, it's your fault if he goes off the rails. It's your fault. You're the one who guards your husband. You've got to keep him away from temptation. You've got to make him happy. So thrilled with you that he doesn't want another woman.
Beth
Would you blame yourself the first marriage breaking up then?
Emma
That wasn't a woman, exactly. It was drink. It's very difficult to cope with drink.
Beth
All right. But had it been a woman, you would have blamed yourself?
Emma
If I had lost my other husband, I would have blamed myself.
Chels
So what do you think of this?
Beth
I'm not surprised. I feel like she's very much of that approach of like, I'm the exception. Obviously, my circumstances are different from any other woman. No other woman would experience these circumstances. Yeah, it's one of those things.
Emma
I also feel bad for her. If her first husband is abusive and drinking and whatever he's doing that causes the divorce, it seems like she's maybe hedging a little bit about what leading, he's cheating or drinking. It's like, she thought she's got married. She's going to be with him forever. They've had a kid together. That's a character who I'm sympathetic with, that narrative of young wife at home, her husband's stepping out. She's blaming herself. But it's like, Barbara can't... At no point in her life we know that she ever not externalize that vitriol towards other women as well. You can't even feel sympathy or empathy towards her in this probably very difficult moment in her life because she's just going to blame everyone else. I mean, that happens a lot when you hear about stories of the conservative women explaining why they're at fault for things that have happened to them. You're like, That sucks. I feel bad for you. But also you're in this position where you're making other people, other women, also at fault. You're expanding it so that you're not alone. And it's a bummer. Yeah.
Chels
It's got to be so lonely. It's got to be like you're all of a sudden occupying the space that you thought that you never would be in because you're doing everything right. And so you have to make these mental leaps to make it not your fault, even though by your own standards, it would be your fault. By Barbara Cartland's standards, her divorce not working is Barbara Cartland's fault. But that's just an unimaginable way to live. It's not her fault. Nobody would think that it was her fault. But she has to get there and then also keep that early belief at the same time.
Beth
Yeah, keep her overarching belief intact. I think that's the way most conservative women feel that way. It's like, okay, here's my overarching belief. I'm the exception.
Chels
Right. At this point, she's divorced. She falls in love with the Viscount Ratondon. But apparently, if you win a divorce, you are watched by an anonymous man for six months called the King's Proctor.
Beth
I'm sorry, that's crazy, but I keep going.
Emma
I've never heard of this role before. This is wild. Yeah, this sounds like it.
Beth
Should be like a romance novel. I keep going. I want someone.
Emma
To- Could you fall in love with your Kings Proctor?
Beth
Oh, my goodness, Emma, yes!
Chels
So their whole job is to watch you. And if they have found that you've either behaved poorly or had an affair during those six months after your divorce, your divorce is null and void. So you have to be on your best behavior. That does.
Emma
Make sense in like, fault divorces. If you're suing for divorce, it has to be someone else's fault. And so you do, it's like a much more like a civil case. Divorces are still civil cases, but you're not...in no fault divorces. You don't need any, there's no harm that has to be done. But if both are cheating, it doesn't work. Also, her settlement probably was different based on her husband cheating, but not her. She probably got more money from her husband based on that. So that makes sense. It makes sense that it could be null and voided. The level of surveillance seems a.
Chels
Little- It seems extreme.
Emma
It seems expensive like the state is... Why are you paying for this?
Beth
I'm so obsessed with this potential novel that could happen. The stakes are so good. Oh, my goodness.
Beth
Yeah, I feel like someone needs to fall in love with their King's Proctor. That is so romantic. People fall in love with their divorce attorneys all the time, like on Sex and the City. Oh, yeah, of course. This is the-.
Beth
This is the historical version.
Chels
It's like he's like, I can't turn her in for the affair because she's having it with me. But when Barbara and the Viscount could be together, Barbara find out that the Viscount couldn't have children. So she loved Raine, and she was always talking about how she's the most beautiful baby in the world. But Raine was a girl. She wanted more children abstractly, but she really wanted boys. She thought boys had more value. This is something that she says in a few interviews. So even though the Viscount built a nursery for Raine, she was like, No, I can't do it. I want more children. Which I think that's fair. You want more kids? I just think it's tinged with Barbara's preference for boys.
Beth
Yeah, asterisk, she wants a boy.
Chels
Yeah, makes it less relatable, but that is a reason not to marry someone. So then she later gets with Hugh McCorquodale, who's Alexander's cousin. And apparently, he fell in love with Barbara at her wedding with Alexander and remains devoted. So he was disabled. He was wounded at Passiondale and had a lot of medical complications after the fact. So they were warned that they would only have five years together because of Hugh's health, but their marriage lasted for 27 years. So she had two sons with Hugh, Ian and Glenn. And they were later very involved in the Barbara Cartland industry, her work as a novelist. But before we talk about her books, I want to talk about Ronald Cartland, her brother. This is a quote from Henry Cloud's book, Barbara Cartland, Crusader in Pink. I guess I'll have Emma read this.
Emma
As early as the beginning of 1936, she was writing in an article in Pearson's Weekly, in answer to the question, What matters most to women? Men matter most. The trouble with most women today is that they will not realize that women can only succeed when they are the inspiration or the shadow behind men, that men become great through them. That is the secret of women's power. It was the cruelest twist of Barbara's life that the one man she could successfully have done this with turned out to be her brother, Ronald.
Chels
That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. It's always.
Emma
Interesting when you see women talking about this who have their own careers, this pervasive thought behind that it's like other women in Barbara Cartland Circle know this, but other women in Barbara Cartland Circle are not making oodles of money based on their own work. And so it's weird when you see that opinion coupled with the women that you hear about and who've published and written a lot are also often independently wealthy. So it's odd that that coupling happens so often.
Chels
Right. So I'm going to get into a lot more about Ronald Cartland. But to your point, everything you read about Ronald Cartland, Ronni is always mentioned in conjunction with Barbara Cartland. She's always the more famous person. It's always tied to her. And she's so involved in his life, in his political life that it is weird to think of her standing behind him because she is always seen as the more notable figure. There's this thing where she thinks that she has to, in order to be worthwhile or to fulfill her womanly duties, she has to lift a man on the highest possible for the pedestal. That's not something that she's going to do with Alexander. That's not something she's going to do with Hugh. But that is something that you can do with Ronnie. I don't want to say that her relationship is just her trying to move him forward and to make him succeed. They were extremely close. She was both very close to Polly. She was very, very close to Ronni. Ronni adored Barbara. They were very close. But this was that big overarching relationship in her life, I think. In a lot of ways, it takes up more space than her marriages and everything else.
Chels
As far as his political life goes, so she helped him raise the 1,000 pounds he needed for election to become a member of Parliament. So Ronald was only 27 when he won the Tory seat at Kings Norton in Birmingham. So he was one of the youngest MPs in the Commons. Ronni and Barbara were both very dismayed by the poverty in Ronnie's constituency. In and near Birmingham, you had Cadbury's, Triplex, and Austin's, but the workers there were paid very little and couldn't get on the dole unless they had nothing else in their homes left to sell. According to Barbara, Ronnie's interest in the poor was at odds with the rest of the conservative party, and he was very disillusioned by them at points. I didn't know that much about Ronnie, but I was very surprised to find that the personal life section of Ronald's Wikipedia page consisted of only three words: Cartland was gay. This is where it gets very interesting. Ronald Cartland was initially backed by Neville Chamberlain, but before World War II, Chamberlain had this policy of appeasement. There was a group of young MPs that were very vocally against peacemaking with Germany, and Chamberlain pejoratively nicknamed them the Glamor Boys, because a decent chunk of them were either gay or bisexual.
Chels
Ronald Cartland was one of the more notable members of the Glamor Boys, so he's featured heavily in Chris Bryant's book, The Glamor Boys, The Secret Story of the Rebels who Fought for Britain to defeat Hitler. According to Bryant, Berlin at the time, shown out as a beacon of permissiveness. It was a place for young men to experiment, discover and embrace their homosexuality, and maybe even find the love of their life. Because of this, closeted MPs were more intimately familiar with Germany in the 1930s, and they were exceedingly alarmed by Hitler's rise to power. And this at the time was not a very popular position to take. Barbara and Ronnie were incredibly close. They wrote to each other frequently and at times lived together. Barbara was very careful not to let her marriage overshadow her relationship with her brother. He went missing at the Battle of Dunkirk, and he was found a little bit later in Belgium. Barbara's youngest brother, Anthony, also died at Dunkirk. He died the day before Ronald, so she lost both of her brothers in that battle. So she told Dr. Anthony Clair in that BBC interview we quoted earlier that she dreamed of her brother's death before she found out.
Chels
Barbara burned Ronnie's letters before she died. But according to Bryant, even what she had quoted from his diaries, you could see that he had, quote, ambiguous and ambivalent feelings about sex. He hung out with quite a few bachelors and other men rumored to be homosexual, including his great friend, Lord Carlo. When Bryant went to ask Carlo's son, the seventh Earl of Portarlington, a delicate question, the Earl is quoted as responding, You're going to ask whether my father was homosexual. I certainly don't know that he was. After all, he died when I was just seven. But I can tell you this, his best man, his best friend, Ronnie, well, he certainly was.
Emma
This is so sad.
Beth
I know, right?
Emma
I'm so sad that Ronnie died. I'm so sad that Barbara was the way that she was. But also, it's sad to lose your brother. I don't know if he had lived, maybe she would have responded to the world slightly differently. I can't imagine losing a sibling like this and then also having that sibling is defining characteristic-based so it odds with your worldview, I feel like that it does not to be too in a psychiatrist chair, but it seems like very... You can connect lots of dots to Barbara's life from this event.
Chels
Right. His death was huge for her. So she did end up writing a biography for him. And it had a foreword by Winston Churchill, actually. I think it's a little bit on the rare side. I want to get a copy of it, but I haven't gotten one yet. But she was very invested in his legacy and in preserving his legacy, with the exception of apparently those letters that Bryant said that Cartland burnt. He was very widely just presumed to be gay. I think why that's notable in connection with his brother, Barbara, is not necessarily her homophobia, which we'll get into later. But when they talked about Berlin in the 1930s, he kept using this term permissive society. That's something that Barbara rails against quite frequently in the '70s and '80s. There's this idea of a permissive society that is going to be everybody's downfall. Yeah, it's just one of those things where it's like sometimes the people that you love are also the people that you find out you've been railing against the whole time. Although I don't think Barbara... I doubt if anybody... I don't think anybody ever asked her. I've never found any reference to her talking about my sexuality, but I very much doubt that that would be something that she would even acknowledge as a possibility.
Emma
I'm reading a biography right now that's related to this with the changing concept of sexuality, the British schoolboy behavior. It gets excused in one way in some areas of England, even though homosexuality is illegal till 1967. It's like, who gets to be gay and what actually is persecuted and prosecuted for queerness? I wonder if that also something about the living out loud in public is what Cartland doesn't like. And it's like maybe the men about town, men who are in deep friendships with each other privately, that also is something that is one of those things that's hard to conceptualize looking back on. Barbara Cartland seems really good at having cognitive dissonance and holding two opposite truths in her head at once. I could see her relying on that to reconcile.
Beth
And we see her with men. If she doesn't approve of that behavior, then she'll just excuse it. And so I'm not saying, Ronnie is doing anything bad, but from her perspective, he is. I could just see in her mind, Emma saying, just within that cognitive dissonance, just like, excusing it. And as long as maybe he's not living it out loud, that's just how men are. We just let them do what they want. I could see her being that taking that approach. And yeah, we don't know how she would have been if he had not died then. But I honestly am very pessimistic. I'm like, She probably would have been the same, honestly.
Chels
Yeah, I think so. And then also something about... I don't know, Ronnie seemed like he was really having a come to Jesus moment about the Conservative Party at a lot of times. It seems like he was frequently at odds with him. He cared a lot about poverty, and that's not something they cared about at all. So who knows who he would have been if he hadn't died in Dunkirk. I believe he was the first MP to die in the war, which is pretty significant. But yeah, there's another thing that ties her to, even further to the Conservative party, it ties her to Churchill. It ties her to all of those folks. Yeah, very sad. Definitely the biggest man in her life out of all of the books I've read about her, his name looms much larger than you would say Alexander or Hugh or George or any of them. It always comes back to Ronnie. It also makes me feel a little bit bad about Anthony because he also died at the same war. Other brothers who died as well. Yeah, I think that he had higher aspirations within the military. But he was so young.
Chels
I think he was maybe five years younger than Ronnie. So he was yeah, a lot of young men died during that war. That was... But yeah, I guess getting back to her books, back to the beginning of the books. March 1925, Barbara Cartland published Jigsaw, in which a virginal young heroine named Mona meets a wicked stranger. So she tries to forget him and ends up marrying Lord Peter Leddenhall, who's an heir to a dukedom. When Peter's father dies and he inherits, she meets her new brother-in-law, Alec, who is none other than the that she initially met. So Mona has to choose between her affection for Peter, which she compares to a child would have for her guardian. It's not very flattering. And her love with Alec, which is much more tempestuous. So Henry Cloud and Barbara Cartland, Crusader in Pink, thinks Jigsaw is not just a blueprint for her books. He says that her life is basically a choice between the Alex and the Peters of the world. It sounds profound, but maybe not. She did always choose the Peter.
Beth
Yeah, I'm finding this description of a love a child would have for her guardian. Very strange.
Chels
It's very weird. But anyways, he has more to say about how Jigsaw was the blueprint for a lot of her heroines, a lot of the Barbara Cartland Virgins. Beth, I'm going to have you read this next part.
Beth
Mona was, in fact, the prototype of all those spiritual virgins to follow. Almost all of whose Christian names end with an A. There are Bertia, Toria, Dorinda, Benedicta, Angelina, Marisa, Paulina, Alida, Anita, Gracilda, Canella, Celina, Dolora, Ivana, Barbara, Matilda, and 300 more. Yes, said Barbara, when I mentioned this to her. I always tried to give my heroine a name ending in an A, simply because Jigsaw brought me such luck and started me off in my writing career. I must admit it is getting very difficult now that I'm coming up on my 380th virgin. You're starting to sound like mumbo number five.
Beth
I want to song with all those, the -a names. All those virgins with the name ending in A.
Chels
I know.
Emma
She doesn't hear this, but saying, I'm coming up on my 380th virgin, makes her sound like Wilt Chamberlain. She's having these virgins. Yeah, it does. That's like, Barbara, you're not listening to what you're saying. That's not what you mean. Oh, my goodness.
Chels
So she wrote very quickly. She could write a book in two weeks. Her process was that she would dictate her novels. And at one point, she had three secretaries who would take her dictation. I don't know the logistics of that. I assume it's one at a time, but maybe they're all factory lining it. Anyway, she rapid fire dictated her books. According to her estate, she wrote over 723 books in her lifetime. So to compare, Nora Roberts has written over 200 at this point, and Danielle Steele, around 185. That's the output similarities there so far. So they would both have to triple the amount of books to reach where Barbara Cartland was. In 1976, Cartland set the world record for most books written in a single year at 23 books. She's got a lot of criticism for recycling plotlines, and her work is very samey. That did not bother her at all. She was very much of the mindset that you keep selling people what they like. And there was always a market for Barbara Cartland during her lifetime, even if it was diminished at some points. So this is where we get into another thing about Cartland and the saminess of some of her books.
Chels
So something that comes up a lot of times when I've heard people talk about Barbara Cartland is the claim that she plagiarized Georgeette Hair. Hair and Cartland both were contemporaries. They were only a year apart in age, and they both wrote Regency romances, but they were vastly different in personality. Hair published these old shades during that general strike of 1926. There was no publicity for it, but it sold incredibly well. Because of this, and also just because she was likely very introverted, she declined to promote herself or become a public figure. She just wanted to write her books and not have to deal with any of that. Cartland, as we are well aware, very much quartered the limelight. The Pleasures and Claims come from Heyers' letters that were published post-humously in Jennifer Closter's Georgette Heyer, Biography of a Bestseller. Apparently, a fan tipped Heyer off to some similarities between her books and Cartlands in the 1950s. And Heyer wrote some very angry letters to her literary agent, Leonard Parker Moore, with what she saw as evidence. Heyer analyzed Cartland's novels and identified Regency phrases that she believes comes from her own work, noting that Cartland misused them.
Chels
Heyer also cited similar characters and plot points. This quote from one of Heyer's letters is actually hilarious. I think I could have born it better had Ms. Cartland not been so common minded, so salacious and so illiterate. Oh, my gosh. Shots fired. Yes. I was looking into this, and I honestly thought the evidence against Cartland was a bit specious, so I asked Emma for some insight. Yeah, so.
Emma
We're going to do a little sideways detour into copyright law. This is mostly, I'm going to talk about American copyright law. I did look up some stats about the status of British copyright law, but I obviously am not an expert on either of these areas, even more so English copyright law, which I know is a completely different beast. But just to help us understand who we should be mad at in this beef, because that's the thing I've seen Chels talk about, is that people will feel like they need to take sides one way or the other ethically on who's cheating who. And it seems like maybe people are picking and choosing based on who they like, Heyer or Cartland more. So the first thing I want to make clear is that plagiarism is different than copyright infringement. Plagiarism is an ethical violation where the plagiarizer may experience consequences from whatever institution is giving them authority, but the words mean different things. Plagiarism is a much more useful concept in academia than fiction writing. Obviously, you can plagiarize in fiction writing, but it's just not useful for copyright infringement. And then something to keep in mind with copyright that can be counterintutive, but this comes up a lot when I see genre fiction fans talk about copyright, is that ideas are not copyrightable, only expressions are.
Emma
This means that things that are intangible are not protected by copyright as much as they feel like they should be, because often the ideas are what makes up what we feel like the bulk of the work. So the biggest portions of a copyrighted work might actually have less protection, things like plot or character compared to short passages. There are cases where copyright infringement is found for incidental art in the background of a TV show. They're filming somewhere, there's art behind it, and the artist will sue the TV show over that art appearing in the show. That has been found to be copyright infringement, while taking a plot wholesale might not be because a plot is an idea rather than an expression. So copyright law in the United States for plots, characters, and phrases, which are the accusations that Heyer made against Cartland, are different. The protections for those three things are different because of their levels of idea versus expression. Courts see them as protected in different ways. Copyright is really weird. There are multiple tests for determining these things depending on what federal circuit you're in, but they also are used sometimes together. One of the main things that Heyer is accusing Cartland of is taking characters.
Emma
But I think this is really relevant to genre fiction is that courts in the United States have found that stock characters are not copyrightable. Things like a rake or a rake with dad trauma or a rake with dad trauma whose mom died, all these things that make up the genre of historical romance are not copyrightable. It falls under this doctrine called scenes-en-faire, which is that stock characters are not unique to an expression within a genre, so they cannot be copyrightable. These characters that come up again and again are not able to be protected. Characters are tricky because there's multiple decisions or multiple tests for these different circuits. But I think a great example is Sam Spade from the detective fiction novel. Sam Spade, the detective character, he was a Dashiell Hammett character created him. Dashiell Hammett sells the rights to Warner Brothers to make the Maltese Falcon. Warner Brothers says we have the copyright to Sam Spade. The court allows Dashiell Hammett to continue writing Sam Spade novels, even though the Warner Brothers has the copyright to The Maltese Falcon because Sam Spade is not instrumental to the plot of detective fiction. Then the other side of that is that Sherlock Holmes is considered a copywritable character in a different circuit.
Emma
You can't have a Sherlock Holmes story without Sherlock Holmes being there. They're good parallels because they're and you can see, like Sam Spade, stock character detective, Sherlock Holmes goes something beyond a stock character. Literature characters are really hard to copyright. Characters that have been found to be copyrightable are things like Rocky Balboa and James Bond. Visual elements really help a character be copyrightable. But that expression of a literary character is just very hard to do. And then phrases, which is the other thing that Hare accuses Cartland of taking, phrases are very hard to copyright. Short phrases, they're just not really what copyright is for. It's much more like trademark, and you can trademark a short phrase if it's iconic to your brand. But the court realizes that phrases conveying an idea are typically expressed in a limited number of ways and therefore not subject to copyright protection. Also, Heyer, she admits that she's getting these phrases from history. She's like, I did all this research, and I found these phrases, and I'm using them correctly, and Cartland isn't, and so she's stealing them from me because she didn't do her own research. The court is very clear history is not copyrightable.
Emma
So Heyer really doesn't have a case, as far as I can tell here, based on her accusation. So if you read about this beef and you think like, Oh, I'm coming down on Heyer side or Cartland side, or I'm coming down on Heyer side because I don't like Cartland and authors shouldn't steal things, she did a lot of bad things in her life, but I don't think this is one of them.
Chels
Yeah, I was always interested in seeing, I think because people were wanting to dunk on Cartland to talk about these plagiarism claims, but I think maybe recently, Cartland has become someone that people are openly skeptical about because of her beliefs about sexuality. But Heyer's beliefs age just as poorly, if not more. So it was interesting to me that people would... I guess maybe Heyer's work has maybe stood the test of time more. You're much more likely to hear people talk about these old shades than you are. Like any Barbara Cartland book or The Black Moth or what have you.
Emma
She really also gets the benefit of not being interviewed. We talked about it. She wants to stay not in the limelight. We don't have all these lightning rod quotes from her about the times that we live in, which is so much of like, Cartland's mythos.
Chels
Knowing how anti-Semitic Heyer was and how racist she was, those interviews would not be good. I think that we would... Cartland has a very public record of all of the many, many things that she has said. So it's a little bit easier if people wanted to ignore hair. Although I think recently people have really started interrogating her more and her effect on Regency romance. But yeah, that's an interesting side note. That's something that does come up a lot when people talk about Barbara Cartland because of these two titans of the industry did not like each other. Is this a.
Emma
Funny Heyer calling Cartland salacious?
Beth
Right.
Emma
Considering what we're going to talk about next because it's like, I wonder how Cartland responded to that because her whole thing- She.
Chels
Loves the virgins.
Emma
She loves the virgins, and it's wild, the Heyer. I think it's salacious maybe for Cartland is a stand in for over the top. Like Heyer is not... She likes the historically accurate, tepid parlor scenes.
Beth
Yeah, maybe it's more like adventure plots that she would do or something that she's referring to.
Emma
But associating that with salaciousness and sex, it's like, oh, Cartland. It's funny. Also, that's how misogyny works. It's like you attack other people, and it's not going to protect you from some other bitty calling you salacious.
Chels
That is actually a very good segue into the next part. Another thing that Barbara Cartland is very well known for is for her infamous argument with Jackie Collins on the set of Wogand in 1987. So Cartland was there to promote her TV movie, A Hazard of Hearts, which we will also talk about later. So if you don't know who Jackie Collins is, Jackie Collins was Joan Collins's younger sister. She was acting initially, and then she published The World is Full of Married Men in the late 1960s.
