Return of the Queen of Romance

Twenty years after the death of record-breaking novelist Dame Barbara Cartland, Gillian Thornton talks passions, plots and a new audience with her son at the family home in Essendon

- Gillian Thornton

Now don’t show your friends or they’ll all want one.’ Dame Barbara Cartland was deadly serious as she handed me a small box wrapped in pink paper. Opening it under her watchful eye, I found a Staffordshire enamel pillbox. A pair of cutesy cherubs danced around her initials on the lid; interlinked pink hearts adorned the sides; and written inside, her favourite word in the entire English language. Love.

It’s 20 years since the Queen of Romantic Fiction died at her beloved Camfield Place, a mansion once owned by Beatrix Potter’s grandfather on the outskirts of Essendon. Born in the year that Queen Victoria died, Dame Barbara was two months’ short of her 99th birthday but had written her final book just three years before, prophetically entitled This Way to Heaven.

Barbara Cartland holds the record as the world’s most prolific author with 723 books to her name, and, despite changes is literary taste, is still ranked as the world’s best-selling writer of romantic fiction. She’s third in the overall fiction stakes after William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie.

I interviewed Dame Barbara on several occasions during the ’80s and ’90s, genuinely looking forward to every pinkhued occasion. Flamboyant and outspoken to the last, she was a journalist’s dream, peppering her conversation with a series of quotable soundbites and guaranteed to have an opinion on everything. With her colourful outfits and increasingly heavy make-up, she was easy to mock, but it didn’t worry her.