In Love with Barbara

• Watchlist

In the 1970s the redoubtable and eccentric Barbara Cartland, prolific author of hundreds of romantic novels, is interviewed on television, where she expresses anti-feminist views. Despite being reminded that she was a working journalist in the 1920s, she clings to her view that what women really want is a romantic husband. Back home she bars women wearing trousers from her house, frustrates Ian, her son and literary agent, by announcing that she is to make an album of love songs and advises her friend, Louis Mountbatten, uncle of the Queen, as to a healthy diet, with plenty of ginseng. As she dictates her latest book to a secretary, the action moves back and forth between the 1970s and Barbara's young life. Her family was once very wealthy but fell upon hard times and Polly, Barbara's mother, always told her that she would marry a duke. However, she marries a drunk who is rough in bed and has a mistress, and she retreats into writing as an escape from him. Ultimately they divorce and she marries his cousin, who encourages her writing and stays with her until his death in the 1960s. There is some irony in the juxtaposition of Barbara's flowery prose and the unhappy experience of her own first marriage.