Update: Dame Barbara Cartland died in May 2000.
One of Britain's finest eccentrics is the authoress* Dame Barbara Cartland.
Dame Barbara sits in her baroque mansion all day writing novels at an incredible rate. All of these novels have similar plots where awfully nice people drink a lot of tea with each other. The hero is always terribly dashing (probably an army chap), the heroine is a simpering idiot and the villain is a complete bounder with a pencil thin black moustache. So far Dame Barbara has written about a million of these books and is only now slowing down as she is well into her nineties. She boasts the longest entry in Who's Who but this is only because she insists that they list the titles of all of her books.
Dame Barbara is a complete relic from another age. By some accident of marriage she is somehow related to Princess Diana and she seems to think that this gives her the right to pontificate on what she sees as the decline of our once-great nation. This is usually a source of great amusement to saner folk.
The point of this page is to introduce people to the wit and wisdom of Dame Barbara. Hopefully, having read the stories below, you'll love her just as much as I do. I have a few good stories that I've taken from various British papers, but I'd be grateful for pointers to any more examples. Also if anyone has any better pictures of her, I'd like a copy.
The official Barbara Cartland web site links to us so it would be churlish not to return the favour.
We're listed at
(God knows why tho')
*I wouldn't normally use the term 'authoress' but it somehow seems appropriate when applied to Dame Barbara.