“Love in the Clouds”: Barbara Cartland’s Religious Romances

Publication year
2009
Journal
The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture
Volume
21.2
Comment

Cartland’s novels promoted conservative Christian values. In this respect, they chime with more recent developments in the market for “evangelical romances”. However, Cartland differs from many of the “evangelical” offerings on the market today in her consistent representation of romance as a mystical ecstasy. For this, she drew inspiration from a number of Oriental, theosophical and occult traditions, which she explained in several non-fictional books. (paragraph 24)