"Love in the Clouds": Barbara Cartland's Religious Romances (Report‪)‬

[1] Barbara Cartland (1901-2000), Dame of Hatfield, sold over one billion copies worldwide of her 723 book titles, which have been translated into 36 languages. The "Queen of Romance," as she is still referred to, earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the top-selling authors of all time. In the years before her death, Cartland's output was regularly over twenty books a year. In addition to this, no less than 160 novels left unpublished are currently being made available to the public in a series entitled the Pink Collection. (1) The relatively sparse criticism available on Cartland's production has focussed mainly on the political unconscious it propagates. It has been argued, for example, that her novels prescribe traditional gender roles for successful matrimony and persuade women to strive for acceptance within the bounds of patriarchal society. (2) The present article does not set out to challenge this; instead it will shift the attention to what Cartland herself saw as "false consciousness" and the means to expunge it. When Cartland and religion are mentioned, it is usually with a focus on her outspokenness for abstinence before marriage (a totem in her writing). Certainly, Cartland's romances are pious and express a traditionalist version of Christianity. I will, however, introduce another perspective on the religious dimension in her books by examining how they also speak with mystical and transcendental accents of romance as a means to spiritual enlightenment. To focus the analysis, her 239th novel, Love in the Clouds (1979), is chosen as a case-study. If this appears to be picked somewhat at random, it will soon become clear that it typifies Cartland's production in several respects. In the second part of the article, the findings of the analysis will be related to the literary history of religious romance, as well as to current trends in the book market. Cartland can be seen as the most successful example of how religious commitment adapts itself to the demands of popular culture. [2] One of Cartland's biographers aptly described her as a "crusader in pink" (Cloud 1979), in reference to the marketing of herself, on the dust-jacket of her books, dressed in lavish pink chiffon ball gowns and her quest to win over the public to her message of love. In fact, Cartland aimed, at all times, to educate her readers into a better understanding of love as the ultimate realization of human existence. Based on the notion of utile et dulce, or what she called "entertainments with a message," she wanted to achieve this through the medium of affordable straight-to-paperback romances. In her many novels, Cartland promoted what she referred to as a "religion of love," a concept she explained as a theo-philosophical concept in her many non-fictional books. The myth that Cartland cultivated in her novels was that we are saved from our material-physical prison by love. If this purpose has generally been overlooked by critics, statements from her large fan base show that this was not ignored. (3)