Abstract
Barbara Cartland is The Queen of Romance. This is what her publicity says, and it is amply justified. She has been in The Guinness Book of Records since 1976 as the most prolific author in the world and she is also the current all-time world bestseller of romantic fiction. In assuming the royal role, Cartland takes on a celebrity status which is promoted to quite ‘camp’ excess. At the same time, she readily undertakes to uphold the responsibilities she associates with celebrity. She firmly believes that she has a moral and educative duty to communicate the values of romance both to her immediate readership and to the public-at-large.
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Notes
B. Gartland, We Danced All Night ( London: Arrow, 1977 ), pp. 354–5.
See M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ( London: Unwin, 1970 ).
The sources on which this section is based include: B. Cartland, Love, Life and Sex, revised edition ( London: Corgi, 1973 );
H. Cloud, Barbara Cartland, Crusader in Pink ( London: Pan, 1981 ); M. Allison, ‘Profile: Barbara Cartland’, Health Now, No 15, (1981);G. Burn, ‘There’s Pornography and There’s Barbara Gartland’, Honey (January 1978); P. Yates, ‘In the Royal Pink: The Princess of Punk weighs up the Queen of Romance’, Cosmopolitan (July 1981).
C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind ( London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974 ), pp. 16–36.
See for instance: S. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex ( London: Paladin, 1972 );
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch ( London: Paladin, 1971 );
A. Barr Snitow, ‘Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different’, Radical History Review (Spring—Summer 1979 ).
See also R. Harrison, ‘Women and Romantic Fiction: Subordination and Resistance’, paper to BSA Annual Conference, (Manchester, April 1982 ).
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© 1984 Rosalind Brunt, Bridget Fowler, David Glover, Jerry Palmer, Martin Jordin, Stuart Laing, Adrian Mellor, Christopher Pawling
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Brunt, R. (1984). A Career in Love: The Romantic World of Barbara Cartland. In: Pawling, C. (eds) Popular Fiction and Social Change. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15856-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15856-0_6
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