Barbara Cartland rises again... (Maybe Millie's next??)

 

Oh how easy it must have been to mock Dame Barbara Cartland with her ageing Barbie-doll looks and positively panting prose... And yet, what an amazing woman she was with no less than than 700 novels to her name by the time she died in 2000 aged 98.  I, for one,  welcome the news that 160 of her unseen manuscripts are soon to be published  in both print and digital editions, giving a new generation the chance to discover what old fashioned love was all about.

Dame Barbara, also well-known as Princess Diana's step grandmother, had no problem with making fun of  herself.  She once joked that  Diana only ever  read Cartland romances - leaving her with an unrealistic view of modern men! With the now-unheard of luxury of dictating  her novels, the author produced most of her work at her sumptuous ten-bedroomed mansion in Hertfordshire, once the home of Beatrix Potter.

Scouring the internet for some of  Dame Barbara's more famous quotes, I found one that really summed up her attitude to writing romance: If you read newspapers today you will find things that our mothers and grandmothers would have been shocked to read. It's sex, sex, sex...all the time and it's not what we want.  I wonder what she'd have made of Fifty Shades of Grey?

The 'new' work, entitled The Pink Collection, comes to us courtesy of the author's son Ian McCorquodale in association with M-I Books. The family even run their own website -www.barbaracartland.com

Meanwhile, I've discovered  that my three-year-old granddaughter has learnt how to write her name, with quite a flourish if the photo, above, is anything to go by. Perhaps one day she'll be writing for 'Millie's and Boon?'