60 Minutes - The Forgotten Queen of Romance Novels | 60 Minutes: A Second Look

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

In 2024, romance – a genre once relegated to the back corners of bookstores – might just be saving the publishing industry. But while more and more readers are looking for love between their covers, few are reaching for titles by one of the first giants of the genre, Dame Barbara Cartland, author of over 600 romances, colloquially known as the “Queen of Romance,” and a favorite writer of Princess Diana. While her work has fallen out of fashion, Cartland's legacy can tell us a lot about the romance genre's contemporary dominance. Best-selling author Casey McQuiston, along with Cartland’s granddaughter Tara Parker, join Seth Doane to discuss her impact on the world. For more episodes like this one, search for "60 Minutes: A Second Look" and follow the show, wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners? Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag, is that from Winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt, did she pay full price? Or those suede sneakers? Or that luggage? Or that trench? Those jeans, that jacket, those heels, is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering, start winning. Win anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning.

Winners, find fabulous for less. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. I like to wander around a good bookstore once in a while, but there's one kind of book that always looks out of place in there to me. It's the bookstore equivalent of television soap opera, these romantic novels. For as long as romance novels have been written, they've been written off. Who are all these guys who go around all day not wearing any shirts?

60 Minutes' own Andy Rooney, essayist and professional curmudgeon, was skeptical of the genre, as you can hear in one of his end-of-show commentaries from 1989. I've never actually read one. I think it's safe to say that the writing is as good as the covers. I've been to many a highbrow indie bookstore where you have to go downstairs and around a corner and down a hall and past the bathroom to get to the romance section and it's one shelf and we don't talk about it. Despite the bad rap, the genre is more popular than ever. Romance books are the second largest category

in the U.S. book market and the fastest growing genre. You know, the world is full of a lot of sad stuff, so it's nice to have something positive. This summer, one of our producers, Hazel May Bryan, wove through crowded aisles at the Brooklyn location of the first ever romance bookstore in the U.S., the aptly named Ripped Bodice. Can I ask how you found out about the bookstore and what brings you to it? Social media, when they were building it, they kind of like went viral on TikTok.

The Ripped Bodice's original location in California opened in 2016, and since then, many more have followed suit. Today, there are nearly 30 romance bookstores across the U.S. and counting. We were just saying we're having decision paralysis because we've never had so many options before. For all the authors on display, there was one writer whom we could not find. I'm wondering if you carry a specific author who we're looking at because she was profiled by 60 Minutes in the 70s. Sure, what author?

Have you ever heard of Barbara Cartland? Yes. I don't know if we have her in store. They did not have her in store. Neither did any of the 28 other romance bookstores in the United States that we asked, which may be surprising considering who Barbara Cartland was. She was probably, well, the most famous romantic author in the world. She inspired an entire generation of young people and old people. And in 1977, 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace

traveled to London to meet her. Romance is dead. Everything is lust, obscenity, and violence, or so it would seem from the movie marquees and the magazine stands. But you wouldn't know it to contemplate the success of Barbara Cartland, a 75-year-old Englishwoman, a cross between the Queen Mother and Jar Jar Gabor. He held her closer still. Now very gently, his lips found hers. He kissed her as he'd done the night on the terrace. And once again, the magical feeling of belonging swept over them both.

She's kind of iconic to romance writers. I mean, what is it, 750 million copies sold at this point? At a time when romance novels may be more beloved than ever, why are so many readers totally unaware of one of the godmothers of the genre? To borrow a bit of internet talk, she's kind of a problematic fave. This is 60 Minutes, A Second Look. I'm Seth Doan. Today, Barbara Cartland, a forgotten forebearer of bearing it all. It is an aphrodisiac. That's liable. On the contrary,

it's a compliment. Oh, oh, where do we go from here? I heard you just had laryngitis. I have laryngitis, which is the reason for the deeper than normal voice. It's actually giving romance novel narrator. So you're doing great.

I got laryngitis at just the right moment for this interview. This past September, I spoke with bestselling author Casey McQuiston. My titles include Red, White, and Royal Blue, One Last Stop, I Kiss Char Wheeler, and my latest, The Pairing, came out in August. Congratulations. Thank you. And we should address your pronouns are they them. That is correct. We wanted to talk with McQuiston because they've been heralded as a romance

wunderkind by a number of major news outlets, New York Times, Vanity Fair, NPR, Time, Rolling Stone, and because we wanted an insider's take on the legacy of one of their literary ancestors. She's a complicated person, and she, I think, has a complicated relationship with women. I think it's very, very interesting to look at her work now, you know, decades later. Mike Wallace sets up the whole 60 Minutes story, and he introduced Barbara Cartland to viewers, saying she's a cross between the Queen Mother and Jaja Gabor. She has written 200 romantic paperbacks, all of them set in the 19th century. 70 million copies are in print around the world.

Her American sales alone have brought her a million dollars in royalties in just the last two years. When you hear those numbers, how is that as an author? I mean, it is mind-boggling. Listen for a moment as she sits in her library dictating her latest improbable chapter to one of her trio of secretaries. He smiled, his twisted smile, as he added. I fought against loving you, my darling.

I fought with every instinct in my body. I need to be clear how much I loved her in that segment. She's iconic. Everything she's doing is high camp and glamorous and incredible. Now, did you, Casey, identify with Barbara Cartland's writing style dictating to secretaries from bed? Is that how you do it? No. I do often have my dog next to me, but she is much less helpful than a secretary. I personally prefer to use my keyboard. Can you describe, because this is a podcast,

you're a writer, is there a way to describe the Barbara Cartland we see in the 60 Minutes piece? Oh my God. Well, I do think the description of Queen Mother meets Zsa Zsa Kapoor is kind of perfect. You work very hard on the image of Barbara Cartland. This interview that we are doing at this moment, you determined that you wanted to be dressed to the teeth. I wanted to

look like myself. This is the Barbara Cartland image of romance. I mean, imagine she's 75 and her sit down interviews. She's basically on a throne in her home with beautiful like brocade curtains behind her, giant flower arrangements holding her little like white shih tzu or Pekingese or whatever it is, wearing the Queen's jewels, like the biggest necklace you've ever seen in your life, and a full beaded like baby pink ball gown um her hair is set baby she got that thing set at the salon it's not moving for three to four weeks um she did not just get up from bed she did not just wake up i don't think she's wearing a tiara but like spiritually she is oh i saw the tiara the imaginary tiara the implied tiara for like

other parts of the interview she's in her bed dictating. She's answering calls on her three separate rotary phones. Hello, darling. Look, there's a bit of a problem over the Canadian rights, which Arrow has put on some of their... You have dealt with it. All right, darling, I'll ring you later. It's really incredible to watch.

You can't believe it's an actual interview. She does represent something I love about iconic romance writers, which is how absolutely camp we can be. Because romance, so much of romance is about committing to the bit. While we were researching this episode, 60 Minutes podcast producer Hazel May Bryan exchanged a few emails with Jean Langley, the now-retired 60 Minutes journalist who produced the 1977 story. Hi, Hazel. Hi. You were telling me that in this email back and forth, there's a funny story about Mike Wallace arriving at the interview on the day of the interview?

Yes. Apparently, it was one of the hottest summers on record, the summer of 1976. And when Mike Wallace got to Barbara Cartland's for the interview, he looked pretty hot. He looked pretty warm. It's a romance novel space we have to specify. Warm as in sweating, not hot as in hot. Exactly. Will you read some of her email for us? Yes. When he arrived at around 10.30 a.m., him being Mike Wallace, Barbara made her entrance down the lavish staircase in full regalia. She was wearing a white silk evening gown, her hair was fully coiffed, and she was in full makeup, ready to go. She was never late.

Seeing that Mike was looking rather hot, she immediately told him that he should go and take a shower before he considered doing the interview with her. Mike thanked her, but said that he was fine. No, you're not, she exclaimed. You must take a shower. This is amazing. It's so good.

The battle lines were drawn. The argument went on for some time, but in the end, she won. Like a naughty schoolboy, he finally meekly agreed. It's so good. It's fabulous. I can just see the whole thing. By the time that Mike Wallace met with her, Cartland had been writing for more than 50 years. After the First World War, my father was killed in 1918, and I had no money, my mother had no money. They said, you must get a job. And my mother said to me, darling, I think you better be a receptionist

or a secretary to a doctor. Because she thought doctors had no sex, something I can tell you is quite unrelated to fact. And I was dancing all night and having a wonderful time. And the last thing I wanted to do was to go and do a job from nine to six, or whatever it was in those days. And so I said, I should write a novel.

And so people roared and laughed and said, you will never finish it. And I thought, well, I will. And when it came out, because I was a debutante and a lady was soiling her lily white hands with work, it was a huge success. Actually, it was a very noxious love story. And because the Duke kissed the girl on page 200, my great aunts never spoke to me again. So they said it must have been experience. For a bit of context, Cartland was born in 1901, six months after Queen Victoria died, when corsets were still in fashion and over a decade before British women were allowed to vote.

So maybe it's not a surprise that her aunts disapproved of premarital kissing. But her family's objections did not stop her from forging ahead with her career, writing one passionate courtship narrative after another. We asked author Casey McQuiston to take a look

at some of those books. Oh my God, they're beautiful. Will you look at these covers and just kind of take me through what you see? We've got No Escape from Love, which sounds a bit threatening. Lord Raven scars revenge and love leaves at midnight. I'm seeing a theme across all these beautiful oil paintings, beautiful covers of Barbara's books.

You could even describe it as basically the same man depicted on every cover. He is in uniform, tall boots, strong jaw, looks about 45, beautiful dark hair, very serious expression, and then always a young ingenue with a snatched waist and a big, beautiful pastel gown, lots of tones of white to represent her purity, lots of tones of dark on him to represent his dark, brooding nature. And in most of them, he's focused on her and she's kind of demurring. She's looking away, which I think is interesting. Usually she's very good and he's very wicked and raffish because that's what we all enjoy. That mode of romance, pure chaste heroine, dark brooding man, had long been familiar to readers. Think Jane Austen. But in the 1970s, a new subgenre of romance known as the bodice ripper began to emerge. Authors were finding mainstream success by including sex scenes. Barbara Cartland,

the queen of romance, however, was firmly opposed to these new sexual libertines. See, what I'm trying to get away from is the vulgarity of thinking that you must use vulgar words, describe vulgar situations, which are all degrading to women. Make no mistake. If that sounds dated, ancient, square, Miss Cartland

is utterly unashamed of it. If a woman is made love to commonly with filthy words like you have in most American novels, all I can say, who's hurt? The woman. We're hurt. It hurts us to read it. I did a little survey amongst all my secretaries, all my friends, and all the young married women I did, and I said, when you have an erotic fantasy, and perhaps you're being undressed, what is the man wearing? And they said, all his clothes, if possible, uniform. Now that is true. What they want, you see, is the virgins, which all my heroines are, because that is the purity of romance. While Cartland flatly refused to include sex in her novels, she seemed to surprise Mike

Wallace by just how candid she could be on the subject. And you mean to tell me, Miss Cartland, that on a moonlight night, never, never were you tempted to have the gentleman do more than brush his lips against yours? You see, it's very difficult to explain to people now,

young people like yourself. Just a note, Mike Wallace was 58 at the time of this interview. You don't understand. We didn't know about things. Do you know that I'd had six proposals of marriage before I knew how people had babies? I asked my mother, and she told me, and she didn't tell me very personally, and I was so shocked. I walked about and looked at people and thought,

you've done that, how awful. I broke off my engagement to a very attractive young man in the lifeguards, and for ages I thought it was the most terrible thing I'd ever heard. Cartland even joked about the women warriors of Greek mythology, the Amazons. Did you know that Amazons always broke the legs of their prisoners because it makes a man a better lover? Having his legs broken? Why? amazons always broke the legs of their prisoners because it makes a man a better lover having his legs broken why um it shortens the blood circulation it's not just that he can't crawl

away no you know well it might be too but the point is that it does make them so the ones who have been crippled in a war or anything like that needn't worry they're very likely very much better lovers than the man who's got everything what's so wonderful about her is she's just such a character. You'd want to, you would want to be in the same room with her. And you got to be in the same room with her for 28 years. Yes. No, she was an amazing character and she was very funny. And I just think, you know, these days everyone takes themselves far too seriously. This is Tara Parker.

I'm the youngest granddaughter of Barbara Cartland. She has six grandchildren. What did you think when you saw the 60 Minutes piece on your grandmother? I thought it was just like her. She was, as ever, very forthright in her opinions and very articulate about what it is that she believed in. And she was very straightforward in that view

and quite happy to argue the opposite with other people if they disagreed with her. Coming up on 60 Minutes, a second look, pulling back the brocade curtain on the queen of romance with one of the people who knew her best. She was the most extraordinary person, and I'm so proud that she was my grandmother. And what was it about her novels that inspired the devotion

of millions of adoring fans, including one princess? Diana, actually, when she was young, was an avid reader of Barbara Carlin books. The White Chocolate Macadamia Cream Cold Brew from Starbucks is made just the way you like it. Handcrafted cold foam topped with toasted cookie crumble. It's a sweet summer twist on iced coffee. Your cold brew is ready at Starbucks. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa?

As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. I want to play a bit of an outtake for you. This is you and your sister, Iona. Open your presents, come on. Tara, give Granny a kiss. Here, Tara, here. Look at Tara's doll.

What? That's just what she wants. Did you want that, darling? What do you say to Granny? Granny. Give Granny a nice big kiss. Why do you laugh? Oh, that's just such a lovely...

I mean, I don't remember that doll, if I'm honest. But we had wonderful Christmases there and it does bring back memories of those days. I've not heard that before. That's brilliant. This again is Tara Parker, Barbara Cartland's granddaughter. As a grandmother, you know, she was always very, very busy, but she always had time for her family. For her, it was really, really important. And also as I grew up, if I ever had need for some advice about romance, she was definitely the right person to go to. I can imagine. Did you ask her?

I did. I did. What types of things? I couldn't possibly divulge that. Oh, please. You're joining us now from Camfield Place, where Mike Wallace visited your grandmother. This is where her cottage industry churns out romance. Camfield Place. 400 acres of rolling countryside, 17 miles outside London. The same spot, incidentally, where Beatrix Potter wrote her Peter Rabbit stories.

How much time did she spend working? A lot. Very, very, very disciplined. Miss Cartland dictates a new book every two weeks. She never misses a deadline. And what's incredible, I think, is that every character is different. The situations are different. The adventures that they have are all different. I read all the possible diaries of the period. I've had great fun because I discovered some diaries of a lady called Lady Anne Blunt,

who went across Syria in 1872. She was a very brave explorer. I read a hilarious article, I can't remember which journalist it was, who was interviewing her and asked her, so what plot did you come up with last night? And she goes, oh, about the Suez Canal. And the journalist was, really? And she goes, oh, about the Suez Canal. And the journalist was, really?

And she goes, yes, of course, why not? Tell me about her fans. Well, I can tell you about some of her existing fans, and they are very, very loyal. Some of them have come on the tours that I do in the house, and they still say how wonderful she is and how much they love her books. And some of them have written and said, when I feel sad, I reread the last chapter of the last book and it makes me feel happy.

Her fans were hugely important to her. She said that all her books had a happy ending except one. You know what happened? A girl sent me a telegram from Australia saying, unless the Dukeke marries Amy, I shall commit suicide. And I really couldn't have the woman commit suicide. She wrote me passionate letters saying she was so upset she couldn't sleep. So I changed it. And I've never, never written an unhappy ending again. She had a very famous step-granddaughter.

Yes, Princess Diana. Granny's daughter, Rain Counter Spencer, married Princess Diana's father. And Diana, actually, when she was young, was an avid reader of Barbara Carlin books. And Granny, even later in life, was sending her copies of her latest books. Directly to Princess Diana. Directly to Princess Diana. And then Princess Diana would reply back saying how much she enjoyed that book. Do you know, do we know today what Princess Diana saw in these romance novels? What she liked about them?

I think it's probably the same as any young girl, which is the hope of that love, to have those stars in your eyes. And that's what these books give, is a bit of hope and inspiration. Parker says that Barbara Cartland wanted to empower her readers. I think she has been characterised unfairly that all her heroines are damsels in distress, when actually the opposite is true. The majority of them, I'd say 99% of them, the woman is the hero of the story and not someone who is, you know, fainting at a spider,

but fighting their way through life. And Cartland did not have to look far for inspiration. Though she may look like Lady Bountiful in her white Rolls Royce and parasol, Miss Cartland is a tough social campaigner who speaks out for unpopular causes. Against very vocal opposition, she established a gypsy camp on her own land called Barbaraville. In the broadcast story, 60 Minutes follows Cartland to Barbaraville, this community that she created for Romani people, they called them gypsies at the time, seeking education and medical care. I discovered in 1960 that gypsy children couldn't go to school

because there was a ridiculous law in England that gypsies had to be moved every 24 hours. So I said, well, it's a damn silly law and I'll get it changed. I did. I just knew it was injustice. They are people. They bleed if you prick them and something had to be done for them. It was the most unpopular thing I've ever done. She's always said that was one of her greatest achievements. But other things that she did was she campaigned heavily for pay and conditions for midwives because she realised quite how important they are to women. One of the other things that she did,

because she would never shy away from a challenge, was she was at a dinner party and the men in the dinner party were saying what wonderful drivers they were and so granny said well women are just as good drivers as you and I'll prove it so she organized the first female only race at Brooklands which is a racetrack in the UK and even still today there is a Barbara Cartland room celebrating the fact that she organized the first ever female race. Writing books, racing cars and fighting for human rights were not her only passions. She likes to call herself the queen of health.

She endorses assorted natural foods, but takes not a penny in royalties. She thrives on vitamins, 90 of them a day, plus honey, and she does missionary work in London's health food stores. So, what you're saying is that vitamins, natural foods, healthy living. Healthy living. In other words... Contributes to... Romance. That's why the two go together. If you are filled with all the wonderful food which you have to take in vitamin form,

you'll be sexy. Don't worry about that. How do you fulfill yourself when you have all of this extraordinary sensual energy? No, darling, I'm 75. Come on. I'm too busy to have lovers. I really am. You know, it takes up such a lot of time. And I have all the fun by, as I say, being in love with the most romantic, marvelous, attractive men in my books. You mentioned that really Cartland was the kind of archetype for the modern celebrity.

Absolutely. The self-promotion, traveling all around the world to go on TV shows, radio shows. It wasn't just the romantic novels. She had her own range of fabrics, which was called Decorating with Love. She had her own scent. She had her own face cream. And she would happily go on any chat show and talk about anything. The difference, I think, with what she managed to achieve versus modern day celebrities is that she didn't have the luxury of technology and computers. I do joke that,

thank goodness, X or Twitter wasn't around because she would be all over that. You think she would have liked it? Oh, she would have loved it. Yeah. Would she have been dictating tweets to her secretaries? Definitely. Yeah. Miss Cartland, does it bother you that the literary world looks down its nose at you? You know, what they really like is a good Russian novel, with everybody full of heavy gloom, contemplating a dead rat in a sewer.

I mean, that's not me, and I couldn't care less. What I mind about are the people who read me. And the people read me. At the time that your grandmother was writing these novels, romance novels were looked down upon by the literary elite. What effect did that have on her? I don't think it had any effect on her. She was aware of it. She was aware of it, but she wasn't writing her books to be the next, you know, Bronte sisters or Shakespeare or Dickens. She wasn't trying to

do that. She was writing for the normal working woman or the woman at home. And that is why if you actually look at her books, she never really uses long words. All the sentences are relatively short so that whatever your level of intellect, you could still enjoy the story. So she was writing for the normal, normal person. And that was deliberate because, again, it was going back to she wanted to bring happiness to those people who may not have it. But it was not just literary elites who took umbrage with Cartland. The Daily Mirror once called her a kind of pink, vitamin-fed vampire living on sweetness, light, and

virginity. And in the 1970s, many within the burgeoning feminist movement took aim at her work for allegedly upholding the patriarchy. One leading activist, Germaine Greer, called Cartland's body of work titillating mush. You know, you deplore

women's lib, and I'm not sure that I understand why you deplore women's lib so. I still think sure that I understand why you deplore women's lib so. But I still think men are wonderful and superior to me. I think a clever man is, I think a stupid man is preferable to a clever woman. I'd rather be with men. Why? Because I like them better. Then you must, then you cannot have a good deal of respect for all these millions of women. Well, I do in a way. I love individuals, but I don't like women collectively. It's quite a different thing.

You're trying to twist me on that. Now you ought to twist me. I refuse to be twisted. What I don't like about women is I find them rather frivolous. So that by and large, they are not the equivalent of men as far as... Not yet. They may come to it, but not yet. Mike Wallace spends a lot of time trying to square the fact that your grandmother,

who presents as a fiercely independent, outspoken, successful woman and writes for an audience of largely women, professes almost a sort of disdain for women. You know her better than Mike Wallace did. How do you reconcile these two seemingly contradictory aspects of Barbara Cartland? Well, I think her last comment says it all, not yet. So when she started work at a young age, the majority of women in that era did not work. And she would be able to explain this better herself. But my belief is that she enjoyed the company of men more purely because the conversation was about politics or about work or about something like that, whereas because a lot of women didn't work,

she wasn't that interested in the sort of more domestic conversations. And that's why I think she would be absolutely thrilled with the progress that women have made now. You know something? You decry women's liberation and you may be just about the most liberated woman I have come across. You know something? You decry women's liberation and you may be just about the most liberated woman I have come across. I'll need it.

Why not? That's right. New crusade? No. Let me have a man's liberation. I don't need it, poor darlings. I think you're being downtrodden. Really? What would you have us do?

Much more masterful, much more commanding, much more authoritative, much more passionate. What do you think your grandmother would make of this boom in the sales of romance novels today? Well, I think she'd have something to say about some of them. I shan't mention names. Elaborate, please. She would always think that romance is timeless. Popular trends change, but the concept of two people falling in love and being happy never changes.

When we come back, the enduring reason to read romance. I like believing in happy endings. I like believing that things work out and that you can have all that you dream. And how the genre has changed. Nobody can see my hat, but it says read queer all year. So I love like just being able to like experience that from the page. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.

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When podcast producer Hazel Mae Bryan went to the Ripped Bodice in Brooklyn on Romance Bookstore Day, she found an enraptured fandom. I love reading the romance books, but even more, me personally, I am so into the community. If romance used to mean a novel about a virginal ingenue and a dark, brooding man, now you can find romance stories about all kinds of people. They had a plus-size romance section.

I was like, finally, I don't have to read about someone who doesn't look like me. I kind of love that a lot of the female leads do have it all, and there's always a happy ending. It's definitely the most inclusive genre, I would say, out of all of them. Best-selling romance novelist Casey McQuiston says that when they started their career, those strides toward being inclusive were just baby steps. In 2016 is when I started writing Red, White and Royal Blue. It certainly was not really precedent to see a mainstream, like as we call them, like big five published romance novel that was queer, that where the main pairing was queer. It was extremely rare.

McQuiston's debut novel, Red, White and Royal Blue, depicts a fictional love affair between the son of an American president and a British prince. There wasn't a lot of precedent for it. And even in 2018, when I signed my first book deal, so many editors and so many agents told me that they loved the manuscript, but they did not see a place for it in the market. I guess they were wrong. You were surprised by its success? Absolutely. Absolutely. I came into this industry, I was like what we call slush pile. And it stacks up and becomes slush? Yeah, that's what we call slush pile. And so I was floored by how broadly

I think it was embraced by romance readers, by fans of pop culture, by readers in general, fans of rom-coms. Never expected it. BookTok, the book reviews on TikTok, was really important for you. Yeah, BookTok is wild.

No one knows how to harness it. And that's the beauty of it. No one knows how to use it. And that's the beauty of it. No one knows how to use it. And so no one can manipulate it. And I love that about it. It's so truly reader driven. And I think that's kind of a beautiful thing. That organic online community helped fuel a boom in the genre's readership. If you were to look at, let's say, the paperback trade fiction list right now on New York Times bestsellers list, I would guess it would probably be somewhere around 10 out of 15 entries would be romance. Romance novels are the second largest category in the U.S. book market and the fastest growing genre. In 2023, five of the top 10 best-selling adult fiction authors were romance authors. But for all of the success, doubts have persisted for decades.

The books that you write, you will not write a paragraph more than three or four lines because your women won't read. Now whose fault is that? Yours and people like you. What do women listen to? What does everybody listen to? They listen to the television and they listen to the wireless. What is that in conversation? So people have got out of reading long paragraphs because it isn't conversation. It's difficult to read.

We've got to make things easy for people. There's a level of discrediting of romance because it is a pleasure genre, because they'd see it as something that doesn't like, quote unquote, like enrich the minds or the cultures of the people who read it, which I think is quite false and silly. And so we kind of just don't talk about it being the gas in the engine that keeps this whole industry puttering along. In the industry, you mean the publishing?? Yeah, I mean the publishing industry. I mean, it's so funny to me to have a genre considered unimportant or unserious when so many people seem to find a home in it, an entry point into literature in it. I know so many people who come to my events and tell me like, your books got me back into reading. I

hate to see it ever get discredited for what it contributes to not just the industry, but to readership and general literacy. In researching this episode, the word smut has come up quite a bit. Okay, you're laughing already. I'm already here for it. Let's go. What's your definition of smut? And can it be interchangeably used with romance when it comes to romance novels? I definitely don't think it's interchangeable with romance. I mean, let's go. Let's start with the definition of smut. The reason I laugh is because I think it's a word that has had so many, you know, negative and judgmental connotations throughout its history, it brings to mind pulpy supermarket, trashy purse-sized paperbacks that you hide from your husband. I think there is an idea that smut is a reductive word that reduces the value of a piece of art,

where it's like, that's just smut. And I think it's kind of a nice way of calling something porn um and i actually love the word smut now because um i think that romance readers see it as as a really fun playful word to use that we've kind of i think rec, reclaimed to talk about pure pleasure reading. Romance fiction has changed a lot since Barbara Cartland was writing. It's gayer and smuttier, and readers have places like dedicated bookstores and TikTok where they can share their love of love. Do you think romance novels reflect contemporary society? Yeah, I think it's, this is why I love thinking about this in context of the work of writers like Barbara Cartland, because I think she kind of, I think we're kind of inverting her type of romance where, you know, she's concerned about, you know, women being degraded by having sexual desires or being overly sexualized. And I think

that modern romance, especially modern straight romance, is much more interested in the agency of a woman and a woman owning and embodying her sexuality and her desires and asking for what she wants and being able to express that, I think that is much more in line with our attitudes about sexuality now. I don't like lust. You see, lust is ugly. Love is beauty. While Barbara Cartland may not have been on board with the new storylines, you can see from the 60 Minutes interview that she understood something about this type of literature that persists to this day. The pride a reader can take in the pleasure. When I feel very tense and or I'm upset by anything, I sit down, read my own books,

and I feel calm. It's better than any form of tranquilizer that anyone could think of, very much better for you. Tranquilizer, because it's a pretty story? Because it's a love story? Why? I think it's a love story and it's all beauty. I mean, it kind of goes back to pleasure reading, you know, not to get into the economy, but times are tough. And if you're going to spend your extra money on something to do in your free time. For a lot of us, it's not going to be something that is a slog or is serious or is, you know, bringing us back into the same feelings we're feeling during the day at work or on our commute or reading the news. I think today what they do is they give some form of escapism. This is Barbara Cartland's granddaughter, Tara Parker, again.

And even then she was saying, you know, you look at the news and everything is dreadful. It's still not great. And a Barbara Cartland can just take you away for a period of time into some place that's beautiful. What I think women are fed up with today is ugliness. You see, everything's so ugly. And women aren't catered for at all. Look at your news on the television. What do you see?

Nothing but wars and bombs and riots. And if they have anybody in a pretty dress, they go, foof, like that in their past. We're never allowed to look at anything pretty. And my books are beautiful. Thank you. Marlon Polycarp, and Tony Onuchukwu. Bill Owens is the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Tanya Simon is the executive editor, and Matthew Polivoy is the senior producer. Invaluable support from Megan Marcus of Paramount Audio. Jean Langley produced the original 1977 broadcast story for 60 Minutes titled Queen of Romance.

She said that out of the 100-odd stories she produced for 60 Minutes titled Queen of Romance. She said that out of the 100-odd stories she produced for 60 Minutes, this story was one of the most enjoyable. Thanks also to the crew and editor of the original piece. Special thanks to Katherine Morgan, Pamela Regis, Jean Langley, and the folks at the Ripped Bodice bookstore. And as always, a very big thank you to the incredible team at CBS News Archives who helped make this podcast possible. I'm Seth Doan. We'll be back next week with another episode of 60 Minutes, A Second Look.

In the meantime, please leave us a rating and review. It helps more people discover our show. And thanks so much for listening.