In the background to the lifelong role she played as the queen of love, there was one story which always haunted Dame Barbara Cartland, who died on May 21st aged 98. In telling it, she gave away much about herself.
It was about a poor-born but dazzlingly beautiful woman, slightly older than herself, who married young into the aristocracy and went to Paris to buy clothes. There she fell in love with another man, ruinously for her marriage, social position and finances. "She was ecstatically, completely overwhelmed by it," Barbara Cartland said, "as only a rather stupid woman can be."
Privately, she was never stupid in that way.
Although she claimed her books - more than 700 big-selling romantic novels - told the truth about love, her hearts-and-flowers, virginal romanticism was underlaid by a voracious, hard-working, hard-as-nails commonsense.
This quality, more energising than her famous 60-a-day vitamin pills, gave her an active longevity. Long life, coupled with a virtuoso instinct for self-publicity, made her into an upper middle-class monstre sacree. In her mid-nineties she was still producing books (outside of the novels she also wrote biographies, children's stories, radio plays, beauty hints and domestic advice), replying to hundreds of letters by return of post and giving superb value in media interviews, during which she concealed her failing sight and turned her deafness into a fearsome defence against awkward questions. Her last book, a novel entitled Love, Lies and Marriage, was published in 1997.
The name of her game, begun in an embarrassing childhood of genteel poverty, was keeping up appearances. It was a gallant, class act. Most endearingly, she was the soul of indiscretion. When her step-granddaughter, Diana, became engaged to Prince Charles, she forecast that she would "reign forever as the queen of love." When, however, the marriage foundered, she said, "she has never really understood men."
Pre-eminent among her five autobiographies is We Danced All Night (1970), shrewd and full of anecdotes. It deserves to stand high as a memoir and sourcebook of the 1920s. She interviewed Marconi, lunched as an ingenue with Churchill and Beaverbrook, bickered with Noel Coward at Deauville and Mountbatten at Broadlands. She lived in interesting times with her ears, eyes and mind open but she never, as her mother had hoped, became an aristocrat except by proxy through her daughter Raine, who achieved it thrice by marriage.
Her paternal grandfather, James Cartland, who had a pseudo-Gothic villa in Edgbaston, made his money with a Birmingham brass factory. Her mother's family were Gloucestershire minor landed gentry. The two quarrelling grandfathers failed to agree a marriage settlement, with disastrous consequences. In 1902, James overextended himself with a railway investment, went bankrupt and blew his brains out.
The newlyweds' lifestyle collapsed from a country house with 12 servants to a glorified cottage with two.
Her amiable but indigent father, Bertie, had to travel to shoots by bicycle. But her determined mother, Polly, took as her motto, "Poor I may be, common I am not". Through thrift and personality she managed to maintain some of their social cachet.
Barbara Cartland never forgot that; she modelled herself on her mother, who also lived until the age of 98. When Bertie was killed in the trenches in 1917, they could not afford to buy mourning. "I have had my coat and skirt dyed black," she wrote to her mother, "Would you like me to get my coat-frock done too?".
This bouncy spirit of make-do-and-mend enabled her to have a London "season". Through teaching at a Knightsbridge Sunday school - where she was popular because she cliff-hangingly serialised Bible stories - she gained entry to the tea dance circuit. She got an art student, Norman Hartnell, later Queen Elizabeth II's couturier, to make her dresses free.
She was, as she acknowledged, no beauty. Her assets were irrepressible gaiety and "rather large, surprised eyes".
She made her first money drawing menu cards for parties and selling paragraphs to gossip columns. In 1923 came the first of her romances, Jigsaw. The News Chronicle review said, "If this is Mayfair, let me live in Whitechapel". Yet, We Danced All Night brings out, better and more compassionately than most other accounts of the period, the part that shell shock, mass bereavement and unemployment played in the brittleness of the 1920s.
She claimed to have had 46 proposals of marriage. But her first marriage in 1927 was undistinguished, to Sachie McCorquodale, of Cound Hall, Shropshire, who had the government contract to print postal orders. Although he sired Raine, he drank furtively and was unsatisfactory in bed.
Finding love letters in his wallet, she sued for divorce. He counter-sued, alleging adultery with his brother Hugh, who had been seen visiting Barbara Cartland in her bedroom while he was away. Her advocate convinced a jury that this was normal if idiosyncratic behaviour for a lady novelist. But it had been the closest shave of her life.
In 1936 she married Hugh. The union, a contented one, produced two sons and lasted till his death from the after-effects of a first World War wound in 1963.
She achieved the title of dame in 1991 and made no secret about how. She said she had lobbied every politician she knew.
By the time of Hugh's death, she had written 67 novels. Afterwards her work rate accelerated to 10,000 words a day. Her tempo of interviews also increased, in the reflected glory of Raine's aristocratic marriages. In 1981 she overreached herself by organising with Raine a lucrative tourist operation to exploit Diana's wedding. She was not asked to the ceremony but - although badly hurt - managed to gloss over the snub.
The same year she was designated Achiever of the Year by the American furnishing industry for wallpaper and fabric designs. In 1988 Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris, gave her a gold medal for selling 30 million books in France.
In 1990 she sent national newspapers her own obituary, bound with pink ribbon. "I have endured a certain amount of teasing and sometimes ridicule by the press," she wrote, "but I have been shown great kindness."
Her own most apt account of herself came in an interview when she was asked about reincarnation. "Most people tell you they were Cleopatra or some queen", she said, "I was Scheherazade in the bazaar, telling a story every few minutes."
She is survived by her daughter Raine from her first marriage, and two sons from her second.
Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland: born 1901; died, May 2000