Barbara Cartland - Villainesses

The women we love to hate in romance novels. That one woman trying to come between out meant-to-be couple and trying her level best to get her claws into our hero.

The Villainess.

Mistresses often get a lousy hand in romance novels and in the Barbara Cartland novel I have read it is no different. They want to keep their man and they will do anything to keep him. And I mean anything, some even going so far as to pull a ‘if I can’t have him then no one’ stunt, that we all know will end badly for her.

And then we have the evil mothers. Occasionally we have the mother of the hero (if she is still alive) not being willing to give up her state as mistress of the house, or not approving of the heroine or whatever crazy reasoning goes on in crazy-moms head and trying to kill the heroine. Sometimes they are even in cahoots with the slimy villain of the tale who – needless to say – has twisted designs on our heroine.

And for the more traditional in the audience we have *drum roll*

The wicked step-mother – because everyone knows that step-mothers are EEEEEVIL. Now, one interesting thing about the wicked step-mother story line is that in a couple of the novels I have read the relationship between the hero and our heroines step-mother begins in what could be viewed as the land of taboo by having them involves – yip, that kind of involved. I don’t know about you guys but I haven’t come across that in a novel before…

So there we have a quick thought on the Wicked Ladies.

Nothing beats having a right witch that you can root against from the beginning, although in some of the books the hero ends up being so dim and arrogant that I wouldn’t mind if the jilted mistress got her way… (sorry is that treasonous talk?)

See you tomorrow when I’ll be posting another book and talking about the man of the hour himself – the hero!