As this wicked world slipped down an ever-coarsening slope toward Tommy and Pamela, Dennis and Carmen, Hef and, well, everybody, Barbara Cartland kept her eye on the ball. And the gown. And the prince and the princess. And the fairy-tale ending many people search for.
She was not so much a writer as a purveyor of purity and promise in a saddened and cynical world. Over a phenomenally successful career that spanned most of the 20th century, she cranked out more than 700 books. Most were formulaic fantasy-romance novels in which virginity met virility and all the bodice-ripping and bawdy bedroom breathing was done behind closed doors.Her writing was of glances and advances, miscues and rescues. Her books ended not with bangs but whispers.
Cartland, who died Sunday at 98 in her Victorian mansion near London, "was in the vanguard of the genre," said super-successful romance novelist Nora Roberts. "Her longevity was astonishing and admirable."
Roberts said she hopes to go out the way Cartland did. Write up till the end. "I admire that," she said. "Barbara Cartland was true to her vision."
The vision of Cartland -- named by the Guinness Book of Records for many years as the best-selling living novelist -- was firmly grounded in the 19th century. "Jigsaw," her first work, was published in 1925, when most of her readers would have been children of the 1800s. For the next seven decades, she wrote for that same audience.
She was convinced that men want innocent women and that women want men who want innocent women. "It is the idealized woman which every man puts in a secret shrine and worships as his wife, as the mother of his children, as his guide and inspiration," she wrote in a 1977 essay.
"Her basic style was fantasy-oriented," Roberts said. "She wrote more traditional, Cinderella-like tales than what you might find in fiction today."
Love conquered all.
Her books were transporting, "bringing you out of yourself," Roberts said. "Changing your circumstances."
The stories were set in old-time England or France or Russia. "I think Dame Cartland enjoyed the historical periods because you could add that fantasy level," Roberts said. "When you're writing something from the 1700s, there's a different sensibility. If you wrote that same story and set it in the year 2000, people would go, 'Puh-leeze!' "
Eventually, Cartland's sales flagged. It's difficult these days to find her novels in a local bookstore. The culture changed; Cartland didn't. Books, movies, TV shows and the folks who enjoyed them grew more complicated; more, as she would say, "unsanctified."
Her publishers tried to persuade her to write complex, modern stories of betrayal, divorce and screwed-up relationships. She thwarted them.
She went overboard every now and then, saying a woman's chief responsibility is to inspire greatness in men, that the creation of a Superwoman would kill any hopes for a Superman.
The irony, often pointed out, is that few career women -- or men -- worked harder than Cartland.
She wasn't a critical darling. But that never deterred her. Reclined on a couch, she dictated her novels -- nearly two dozen a year for a couple of decades. Perhaps the best proof of her influence, beyond the more than 650 million books sold worldwide, is that Princess Diana, as a young girl, read Cartland's romance tales. Cartland's daughter, Raine, married the Earl of Spencer. As a result, Cartland became Diana's step-grandmother.
Pink-and-white, frilly, feathery, froufrou things were Cartland's clothes of choice. She took a bunch of vitamins every day. She owned fancy Rolls-Royces and lived a full, sometimes romantic life. She married twice, had three children and traveled far and wide to research her novels. In 1991, she became a dame of the British Empire. She wrote five autobiographies.
Through thick and thin, she continued to dictate the same kind of prose, like this ending of the 1981 novel "Pure and Untouched":
"He took one last look at the moon, the stars, the lights of the city, and he felt as he drew Anoushka below that their beauty went with them.
"It was all part, as they were, of the love of God, which is purity itself."
When Cartland died, she took some of the world's innocence with her. Even if it was only fictional.