“Imperial Splendour” (1979) is a romance novel written by Barbara Cartland. It is set in the same time and place as Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”: Russia in the 1810s during the war against Napoleon. Like “War and Peace”, it features ballrooms and battlefields and the lives of the rich and famous. It is like “War and Peace” baked down to a 180-page romance novel for an English-speaking audience, making it shorter and easier to read.
Barbara Cartland: In the 1900s she wrote over 700 books and sold over a billion copies, putting her up there with the Bible. She was easily the best-selling writer of romance novels in the English-speaking world. That made me want to see what she was about.
Cartland is no Tolstoy, or even Jane Austen. “Imperial Splendour” is shorter, more formulaic, and more a romantic fairy tale than a book that shows the breadth and depth of life or love.
History, geography, and astronomy: It seems Cartland took pains to get the history parts right, going so far as to visit Russia in 1978. And even her moon, unlike Hollywood moons, is in the right phase at the right time in the right part of the sky. From her book I could correctly deduce that the city of Odessa looks east across the sea.
Love: But I could not correctly deduce much about love. Not only is her heroine a virgin, as are most Cartland heroines, but she does not get kissed till seven pages from the end. The story ends on her honeymoon night. No bodices were ripped, no water bills paid, no love gone wrong.
Money: The heroine, a Russian ballet dancer with no money, wants to marry an English duke! It is never pointed out that for him to marry her, he would be giving up the fortune that he could have by marrying someone of his own class. In this book love conquers class, as it sometimes does, but class in Cartland’s world is not much more than shallow, mean-spirited snobbery. In Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), money comes up in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first page:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Inner struggle: The heroine, Zoia Vallon, is born of a French father and Russian mother – and lives in a time and place where France is invading Russia! What a wonderful idea for a character. But Cartland does not do much with it. It is just another plot obstacle, like Napoleon’s invading army. I wish she had shown more of Zoia’s inner and outer struggle with it.
Page-turner: The book was well-written in the sense that I was never bored and I always wanted to turn the page. Never a dull moment what with the French burning down Moscow. But if it was longer or if it was not Barbara Cartland, I might have stopped after the first chapter or two.
– Abagond, 2018.
See also:
- books
- more my speed:
- Reading War and Peace
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Abagond 
Dame Cartland, was also step grandmother to Diana, Princess of Wales. Had she written a romance novel about Diana, Charles and Camilla – that would have also been an interesting read…
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Thanx for the hint; I think I should read this, too, even if from what you’ve described, it is more like a lighter adoptation of another semi-realistic description of Russia (e.g. it were the Russians who had burned Moscow down to the ashes following an ancient Slavic military tactics, not French).
I forgot to mention here earlier that one of the best love novels ever written by a foreigner about Russia I have ever read — and I’ve read a lot of them — is James Meek’s The People’s Act Of Love. Meek speaks a decent — for a foreigner — Russian and has spent about a decade or more in the Post-Soviet Russia.
It’s written in a nice British style which is read as a translation from Russian classics. The setting is Siberia in Russian Civil War with Tungusic shamans, Chech Republic soldiers, cannibals and a city of castrates, all described with at a high degree of authenticity and verisimilitude, even to a Russian reader, even if the setting looks like a carnival of oddities when described for a first time–
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