Even more about Barbara Cartland: novelist and plagiarist

Barbara Cartland has become a blog obsession over recent weeks. We have had Matthew Sweet’s marvellous biography: Barbara Cartland: Give Pink a Chance Which then brought out Daniel Milford Cottam’s incredible pictures of her clothes: Barbara, the clothes, and a guest on the blog … and now we’re moving on to Barbara Cartland’s literary oeuvre. The books. Well. I had read some of her autobiographies (she wrote a few…) which are very enjoyable for the detail and the picture of life. She wrote contemporary romances, and also historical fiction, often set in the Regency period. She wrote hundreds and hundreds of them: Matthew Sweet says she maintained “her literary output with the zeal of a tractor factory during Stalin’s first Five Year Plan.” She used to say sometimes in interviews that for every historical book she wrote, she read 10 books for research. This raises two questions: 1) Do we believe that she read ten for one? 2) How many of those research books were by Georgette Heyer? It…