She was very young and very lovely. She had fair hair which seemed to glitter as if it was touched by the stars. She had huge eyes and a straight nose beneath which were perfectly-shaped lips…’
This gushing description could easily be of the young Diana Spencer. But it’s actually the introduction to Daniela, heroine of The Marquis Wins, a typically overheated tale by romantic novelist Barbara Cartland.
The teenage Diana adored Cartland’s books, historical romances about wide-eyed heroines and brooding highwaymen, French counts and Scottish lairds. There’s a youthful photograph of her curled in an armchair, Cartland in hand, a couple of others scattered around the cushion. ‘In those stories was everyone I dreamed of, everything I hoped for,’ she would say, years later.
And yet her hopes ended with marriage to a man she was palpably unsuited to. Was, I wonder now, her Cartland craze at least partly responsible? With their wildly unrealistic depictions of love, did these novels drive her into the arms of someone she mistook for the romantic ideal? A prince, yes, but one who could never love her back?
Biographers are unimpressed by her reading choices. ‘The literary equivalent of afternoon TV soap operas’ is Tina Brown’s view in The Diana Chronicles. ‘Perhaps the worst preparation for life in general and her own life in particular that she could have had,’ sniffs Sarah Bradford in Diana.
The teenage Diana adored Cartland’s books, historical romances about wide-eyed heroines and brooding highwaymen, French counts and Scottish lairds. A young Diana pictured with a book
Cartland’s syrupy fictions are certainly poor training for ordinary life. Yet to the young Diana setting her cap, or tiara, at the heir to the throne, they must have seemed blueprints for success. After all, in each one the heroine lands the hero of her dreams.
My latest historical novel, The Princess, is about Diana’s route to the altar. A chain of events as unlikely as any Cartland and, I suspect, very possibly informed by them. Because the deeper I looked into my subject, the more I suspected a direct link between these mushy romances and the 1981 royal wedding. Given that event’s seismic consequences, that makes these works some of the most significant in British history.
Cartland’s novels have largely disappeared, but half a century ago, they were wildly popular. Cartland, who died in 2000, produced over 700, dictated from her chaise longue to a long-suffering secretary. Take The Odious Duke, which Diana is pictured with, above. The eponymous aristocrat, out riding, collides with a stagecoach. He is aided by humble but beautiful young Verena, who directs him to a blacksmith. As his horse is reshod, romance ensues.
There are Verenas, or versions of her, in every Cartland novel. Sweet, shy, young heroines who, against the odds, win the heart of the worldly prince, or prince equivalent. Remind you of anyone? In 1979, Charles was 30 and unmarried. The last Prince of Wales had not only been slow to the altar but had chosen, in Wallis Simpson, the most unsuitable wife imaginable. The Windsors, terrified history might repeat itself, were searching, increasingly frantically, for a bride. But who?
Strict conditions had to be met — conditions Camilla, Charles’s real love, did not. She must be young, pretty, Protestant and an aristocrat. Talent-spotted by the Queen Mother at a wedding, Diana’s rank and good looks immediately put her in contention. She was young but with a naive quality that made her seem still younger.
How would Diana succeed where some of the world’s most glamorous and sophisticated women had failed? The answer, I believe, lay in that very naivety — a sensibility shaped by swoony paperbacks.
Her heart-racing reading blinkered Diana to the reality of a man some 12 years her senior. Men in Cartland novels were always older — usually weary libertines whom Cartland categorised into a sort of Burke’s Peerage of ‘dashing dukes’ and ‘magnificent marquises’.
They are ‘noble, imperious and terrifying when angry’ or ‘resolute, principled and unreadable until true love intervenes’. ‘I can fight your battles,’ the Marquis of Crowle assures Daniela in The Marquis Wins. Cartland simpers: ‘She knew he was setting out to destroy the dragon or any enemy which frightened her.’
Her heart-racing reading blinkered Diana to the reality of a man some 12 years her senior. Pictured at her and Charles’ wedding
Diana had plenty of dragons. Her parents’ divorce was exceptionally nasty; Frances Spencer’s own mother, Lady Fermoy, claimed in court that her daughter was an unfit parent. The result was that Frances lost custody and the four Spencer children stayed with their father in Norfolk, seeing their devastated mother in London only every few weeks. The awful scenes at the station when they had to go back twisted the knife in Diana’s sensitive young heart.
Men in the books were older, noble and imperious
Who could blame her for turning to Cartland and a fictional universe where love was valued and rewarded, and the handsome prince and beautiful princess lived happily ever after?
Talking to Tina Brown, Diana’s former nanny recalls a young girl obsessed with the idea of romance. ‘I remember her saying, ‘I shall only get married when I am sure I am in love and we will never be divorced’.’ Saddled with siblings who teased her, a father she longed to impress, a disappointed mother and her own lack of self-confidence, Diana likely spent school holidays just as she is in that photo — holed up in an armchair in some remote corner of Althorp, lost in an alternative romantic reality which became so real it formed her world view.
No surprise then that, after meeting the Prince of Wales, who had earlier dated her sister Sarah, Diana was as head over heels as any novel heroine.
Admittedly Charles was a bit detached, and often absent. But that was fine too. Another trope of Cartland’s novels was that a heroine must suffer to attain true love. Such difficulties gave a romantic logic to what could be, for Diana, months between encounters.
By the time of the engagement, she had only met Charles 13 times and even on those occasions was barely ever alone with him. A more realistic girl might have heard alarm bells, especially after that notorious ‘whatever love means’ quip during a TV interview to mark their engagement. Diana’s more practical friends were concerned about the effect her choice of reading was having.
Tina Brown describes how, when Diana arrived at her nannying job with a Cartland romance in 1980, the year her relationship with Charles began, her employer suggested she switch to broadsheet newspapers ‘if you want to keep up with Prince Charles’.
Mary Robertson, the banker Diana worked for, was concerned that her infatuation with the prince was ‘based on her romantic image of him, not on the man himself’. After all, what cloistered teen wouldn’t be captivated by phrases such as this from The Marquis Wins: ‘He wanted to worship her purity’?
Purity is a key word. Forty years ago, prospective royal brides had to be virgins. This had been another challenge for the Windsors. In 1979, thanks to the Pill, fear of pregnancy out of wedlock was not the concern it had once been, meaning even earls’ daughters had sex before marriage. Did the right girl — ‘without a past’ — exist any more? Here, again, Diana ticked the box. It seemed unlikely. She was 19, very pretty, highly eligible, living in a Kensington mansion flat and socialising with the cream of Sloane Ranger male society. How could she not have succumbed?
A fictional world where purity was rewarded
An easy question for anyone who knows their Cartland. Chastity, in her novels, is all. The heroine who resists is rewarded with true love. This was why, as Diana famously put it, she ‘kept herself tidy’ for her handsome prince.
Diana, up to her eyes in the tropes of resistance and reward, must have hoped Charles would melt in the usual way, that the pure young heroine would be a dazzling revelation.
And so the Royal Family’s unique problem was solved by a girl with a unique outlook. Had an ancient author in trademark pink frills really helped bring this about? Stranger things have happened. The fact that Cartland’s daughter Raine married Diana’s father makes it even stranger.
Diana’s dreams of love of course ended in disappointment and tragedy. She might have been happier had she never picked up a paperback romance. But that shy teen who became a luminous princess in real life remains the heroine who continues to fascinate us all.
The Princess by Wendy Holden is out today (Welbeck, £14.99).
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