Bride to the King

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Sawing a Lady in Half

they want it to be true

and they don’t want it to be true

that they want it to be true

— Nicky Beer, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes¹

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On Bluesky a few months ago, Allie posted the prompt asking why people liked (or disliked) historical romance, and I thought about Diana Spencer.

There’s this anecdote, an isn’t it funny? that is often repeated and makes my skin itch every time I hear it: Barbara Cartland, the regressive, cartoonish grand dame of 20th century romance novels, was Diana’s step-grandmother. Even stranger, Diana voraciously read Cartland’s novels when she was a child.

This might seem benign, but you can’t write a book or an essay or make a podcast about Diana with loose facts dangling about. You have to join them, to make them mean something, and in connecting point A to point B, Diana always comes out the loser, someone who unknowingly wrote her own tragedy. In her meanspirited biography, The Diana Chronicles, Tina Brown makes a meal out of Diana’s favorite Cartland book, Bride to the King, as a prescient indicator of Diana’s deepest desires. Brown called Diana’s childhood romance habit “a diabetes of the soul,” outright stating that Diana’s cavity-inducing youthful optimism, her naive belief in happily-ever-afters, led to her downfall at the hands of the British monarchy.

But if Tina Brown had read the book, she’d know that Cartland’s heroine Zosina was already a princess, married off by her heartless father to another small principality in hopes of forging an alliance that could withstand the North German Confederation’s attempt to absorb them during the Franco-Prussian war. Zosina’s life wasn’t much like Diana’s at all, with the exception that Zosina was continuously told by her family that she should be quiet and more obedient. This is not a grand, intuitive statement about Diana’s upbringing, but a commentary on the widely experienced phenomenon of being a girl in a world that doesn’t like girls all that much.

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My feelings on modern royalty range from outright hostility to ambivalence. I think often of Mark Twain’s famous passage about France’s “two Reigns of Terror” in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, bemoaning the excess of sympathy for the victims of the “Minor Terror, the momentary Terror so to speak” while we pay dust to the common folk who experienced centuries of “lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break” in relative anonymity. This is not to say that I can’t be moved by the struggles, foibles, and tragedies that come with such a rarified position, but that I’ve consciously chosen not to devote an outsized amount of attention to it, reserving my heartache for those that require my outrage as well.

But because I’ve been long-fixated on Barbara Cartland², who is one of, if not the most successful romance writer of the 20th century, Diana’s name reenters my orbit with some regularity. In death Diana is near-universally beloved, and yet this thoughtlessly cruel aside lingers on: That she unknowingly bought into a fantasy world, only to be crushed by the harsh realities of a marriage that she naively, stupidly did not prepare for.

The calculated nature of this myth-making is even more blatant when you look at commentary on Cartland’s life. Cartland has stated that she bases all of her heroines (sometimes called her “Cinderellas” or “virgins”) on herself, going to great lengths to give hundreds of them a first name ending in “A” to match her own. They were young, beautiful, and “pure.”

Cartland placed primacy on a woman’s subservient role in heterosexual marriage, a role that, as a successful novelist and public figure her entire adult life, she never deigned to adhere to. According to Cartland, if a marriage fails it’s the woman’s fault for failing to keep her husband happy, with the exception of her failed marriage to her first husband, Alexander “Saschie” McCorquodale, which collapsed due to reasons she maintained were outside of her control.³

It’s true that Barbara Cartland told Tina Brown that “the only books Diana ever read were mine, and they weren’t terribly good for her.” But Barbara Cartland was also referred to as “the most reliable sound-bite artiste of her times” by The Telegraph when she died. She was always talking, and she, Barbara Cartland, was her own favorite subject. I imagine it wouldn’t be difficult to coax her into this analysis.

Cartland was an enforcer of these marital expectations, someone who neatly avoided the pillory for her own failures, then stoked the fires of paternalistic “sympathy” Diana’s extraordinarily public marital woes engender to this day. Cartland is easy to sneer at — she was an outspoken prude who dressed like a sugar plum fairy — but even the outright contempt she occasionally musters treats her as a person with a brain, the savvy-mythmaker in contrast to Diana’s credulous acolyte.

It would be criminal to write about Cartland without including a picture, for obvious reasons.

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The description of Noble Blood’s podcast episode on Barbara Cartland is exemplary of this mode of storytelling: “Though her books were primarily aimed [at] and read by women, Cartland's messages were strickingly [sic] regressive, with an emphasis on purity that seems strange to modern readers of romance novels. As her step-granddaughter Diana Spencer would one day discover, some fairy tales don't align with reality.”

I’ll concede that the podcast’s premise necessitates drawing a deeper connection between Diana and Cartland (not royal herself, but hailing from what biographer Henry Cloud once hilariously called⁴ “the most fertile of imaginative seedbeds: the dispossessed Edwardian gentry”) but that doesn’t make an assertion about the famous photograph of a young Diana holding Cartland novels: “We can only imagine she's dreaming about her own romance one day with a duke, or an earl, or even a prince” easier to swallow.

Penny Junor’s absolutely loathsome book, Charles: Victim or Villain? makes similar claims about Diana’s childhood mindset: “Like thousands of girls of a similar age, who devoured Barbara Cartland novels and soap operas on television, she had no interest in a career. All she wanted was to be loved, looked after, have babies and live happily ever after. She thought she had found a man who would provide all of this and more. In the excitement and thrill of the chase she had visualised none of the reality.”

The Daily Mail is low-hanging fruit, but Wendy Holden’s article Why Diana's love of Barbara Cartland novels bewitched her into falling for the wrong man has a rather hilarious Carrie Bradshaw cadence that I can almost admire: “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?”

It’s very strange to pretend that romantic love is only aspirational in Barbara Cartland novels, that there are no movies, plays, poems, or songs that share a similar preoccupation in Diana’s childhood orbit. Yes, Barbara Cartland’s heroines lived happily ever after while Diana did not, but those heroines were calcified at the age of nineteen. The novels ended, their characters ceased to exist, but like Diana, the feelings they evoked remain.

My friend and podcast co-host Beth recently wrote about Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, a four-decades-old cornerstone of romance scholarship that is, frustratingly, currently recognized by less rigorous writers as authoritative rather than as a perspective to interrogate. Radway’s ethnography of romance readers practically drips with condescension. Per Beth, “there is a fatal flaw to this work in Radway’s use of psychoanalytical theory as applied to this ethnography,” and that the “unconscious often motivated Radway to disregard what the readers actually said in search of a supposed deeper meaning.”

Or as Beth more bluntly put it in her conclusion: “[Radway’s] a feminist! She feministly spoke over a group of female romance readers and told the rest of us their hobby is fantasy-escapism that’s damaging to women.”

The Smithton (a pseudonym for a real Midwestern town) readers Radway interviewed were, aside from also being heterosexual woman, as far away demographically from Diana as you can possibly imagine. They were voracious readers and housewives, who, according to Radway, may have absorbed regressive ideas unknowingly.

This reminded me a lot like the “friendly” fire that Diana often gets: sympathetic parties who very sympathetically imply that her misfortune was borne of her own myopia. Like the Smithton readers, Diana has very famous candid interviews. Pathologizing her without listening is self-aggrandizement disguised as insight.

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Kelly Faircloth’s essay about Cartland in Jezebel, Romancing the Throne, is a good retrospective on the author that makes the Diana connection without putting thoughts into Diana’s head. But this essay, written in 2020, continuously references how other people perceive Diana as a Cartland heroine, and in an attempt to linearly chart progress Faircloth asserts that “the story of the princess has been transformed over the intervening years. Part of what made Meghan Markle such a compelling royal bride for a worldwide media audience was that she wasn’t the Cartland heroine who gasps out every word and has never left home.”

I doubt Faircloth meant to imply that Diana’s reign was fatuous in comparison to Meghan Markle’s public appearances, but I’m also unsure what other conclusion I’m meant to draw, given how tightly she connects the Diana story to Cartland’s impuissant heroines. Additionally, I have the benefit of writing this in 2025, but Markle’s public skirmishes with the royal family do not prove that the public is finally ready for a woman in this position who speaks her mind. On the contrary, Markle became the target of an infamous hate campaign, its viciousness exacerbated by the virulent racism of the British media.

I would sooner launch myself into the sun than criticize Hilary Mantel, so luckily even though it ends on a whimper I think her famous essay, “Royal Bodies,” is a work of art. The public sticking point was her assertion that Kate Middleton was “a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore,” but the entire piece is about royalty as entertainment and commodities.

She quotes Sue Townsend’s diagnosis that Diana was a “fatal non-reader” and says that she, Mantel⁵ was “too snobbish to have read” the Barbara Cartland novels that were so dear to the woman. But Mantel was also, as any good historical novelist should be, aware of her occupation of insatiable viewer, looking for a connection, an angle, something of interest to extrapolate on. Mantel posits that Diana didn’t know the end of her own story. But who could possibly?⁶

The most revealing part of the piece is when Mantel gets caught staring at Queen Elizabeth at an event, saying that “she looked young: for a moment she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at. And I felt sorry then. I wanted to apologise. I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at.”

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The full quote from Brown’s biography on Diana says: “Children faced with grave emotional distress often cling to a fantasy figure or a magical friend. It took a fantasy village to sustain Diana. Her addiction to romance novels became a diabetes of the soul, leaving her spiritual bloodstream permanently polluted with saccharine. She might have been the reader-at-risk that George Eliot targeted in her 1856 essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” She clung so tenaciously to her dreams that they became a willful act of unknowing.”

I prefer this blatant nastiness to the more muted references to Diana’s failed romantic fantasies. They’re doing the same work, but Brown is not falsely positioning herself as a sympathetic party.

I don’t care for Cartland’s novels and I’m not interested in writing a passionate defense of them, but it’s not a coincidence that Diana read Cartland. Cartland was an industry unto herself in the mid-20th century, so widely read that her son Ian once quipped that her only competition was not another romance author, but all of Mills & Boon.⁷ It seems like we have a lot of other failed marriages to interrogate, out of fairness.

Because romance novels are not allowed to exist as value neutral — they’re either giving our bodies sugar poisoning or are feminist because women read them — we think we can infer how to appropriately slot them into readers’ lives. But people, even romance readers, are complex and contradictory and difficult. There’s no monolithic interpretation of these texts, no agreed-upon fantasy, no clearly explicated value system.

We should be wary of people who think they can chart the course of a life — decades of trials and triumphs and sorrows and love — by condemning an early pleasure. Do they think this is where it all went wrong, or do they want it to be true?

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1. Thanks to Nicky Beer for permission to use this absolute gut-punch of a poem. You can buy Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes here.

2. I’ve since become a more confident podcaster, but the Reformed Rakes Barbara Cartland episode still holds a very special place in my heart.

3. In Gwen Robyns’ 1984 biography Barbara Cartland, Cartland asserts that McCorquodale was cheating on her, and that she intended to let it go until he started having her followed.

Later, in a 1991 episode of In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, Cartland told Dr. Anthony Clare: “If you marry someone you love, it's your fault if he goes off the rails. It's your fault. You're the one who guards your husband. You've got to keep him away from temptation. You've got to make him happy, so thrilled with you that he doesn't want another woman.” When Clare pushed back on this, asking if she thought she was to blame for her first marriage failing, Cartland said no, because her marriage broke apart on account of McCorquodale’s alcoholism. She told Clare that if another woman were involved (which was her version of events in the 1980s) then she would have been at fault.

4. Barbara Cartland: Crusader in Pink by Henry Cloud. This 1979 biography of Cartland is much more interesting than Robyns’s, because Cloud occasionally alludes to the contradictory nature of Cartland’s most strident opinions.

5. *Jeb Bush voice* “Please clap.”

6. In the words of Hilary Mantel: It’s a question.

7. The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance by Paul Grescoe