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Dame Barbara Cartland scored her first century in 1964, when, 40 years after she had penned her first book, her list of published works hit the magic figure of one hundred. She stopped just a year and two months short of a century of another kind, passing away peacefully in her sleep at the age of 98 this Sunday. Her books had outpaced all but the most prolific writers, racking up at a total of 723. She once said she wrote a novel every two weeks in the 70s, and explained that she had a little assistance with her plots: "When I need a plot I say to God `give me a plot' and he sends me one in 24 hours."
Cartland, who also wrote Mills & Boons as Stella Martin, beat out Georges Simenon (about 400 works) and John Creasey (estimated output 565 thrillers). The romantic novelist was pipped by Kathleen Lindsay, however, who wrote an estimated 904 novels under six pseudonyms; and the 17th century Spanish writer Lope de Vega, who is reputed to have tossed off some 2,000 works. But Cartland's prim romances still attract millions of readers today, while there are few takers for either Vega or any of Lindsay's six avatars.
Even the scant handful of readers who eschew Cartland's prolific pap can't avoid knowing the name, or the quirks attached. She was the first to demand, and get, a white Rolls Royce; she believed that you could never have enough of either vitamins or virginity; her wardrobe was given over to frills, flounces and puffs; and her love of pink was a much-imitated trademark. As the obits poured forth from news agencies, the UK newspapers and romance sites on the Web, it was interesting to observe just how much trivia was available about her life.
In 1974, Mrs Ronald Rougier died at the age of 71. The obituaries were scant _ outside of the publishing industry and family friends, few knew that Mrs Rougier was the real name of Georgette Heyer. In her lifetime, she had produced over 50 bestsellers, most of them Regency romances; she commanded a following as faithful as Cartland's, perhaps more discerning. Few, if any, of her fans had the least idea of the details of her life _ most had never seen a photograph of the author. Heyer wrote her first romance at the age of 19; Cartland her first at the age of 21. But besides that early start and genre, the two novelists had little in common.
Cartland worked the publicity machine in all its forms. Her entry in Who's Who was for years one of the longest, chiefly because she insisted on the listing of all her published works. Mrs Rougier's entry in Who's Who was a bare 18 lines.
The two researched differently as well. Cartland's romances spin merrily from Singapore to Haiti to Penang. Typically, a 1962 visit to Hyderabad inspired Love on the Wind, which features a mysterious stranger whose chief occupation is to rescue Sita, the hapless and oft-kidnapped heroine. The Ilbert Bill hovers in the background. The half-a-dozen secretaries she employed were chiefly human dictographs who also looked up the odd detail in encyclopaedias or atlases.
Heyer's research files were exhaustive and meticulous. She wrote chiefly about the Regency era and had a mini-library of works on the period; her books span a narrow geographical circumference. Though she spent her early married years in Tanganyika, and travelled extensively in Scotland with her husband later, she refrained from using either country as a backdrop.
They parted company, too, on the subject of women. Despite her markedly independent life, Cartland saw woman as man's companion and helpmate. Her novels deny the existence of premarital sex, her heroines guard their virginity to the fade-out. Leering villains abound in her romances, but loveless marriages, fallen women and heroines who also count independence among the things they desire are absent. In her personal life, Cartland often lectured on the evils of feminism; she did her bit during the second World War for women, by persuading the Ministry of Defence to release funds for silk stockings!
Heyer's heroines, in contrast, gained in character over the years. Most of her books carry an awareness of the social condition of the times. The lack of space for women who wished to be independent, the fate of women who had either fallen or remained, notoriously, in society, the afflictions of loveless couples, even the plight of chimney sweeps find space on her pages. Beneath the romantic syllabub lay a hard core of realism.
And there you have it: two romantic heroines, both dead, both in their different ways, wildly successful. We know more about one than we may perhaps have wished; we know much less about the other than we might have wanted to. The parallel lives of Cartland and Heyer, whether pink-edged or no, is the romance I'd really love to read.