Barbara Cartland - Fathers

After mentioning the dad is so many of the posts I couldn’t not post about the dads all by themselves.

The fathers in Barbara Cartland novels are a funny breed. And by funny what I really mean to say is that on the whole they are weak, selfish and have no self-control – they give dads in general a pretty bad name!

How do I come to this conclusion? Well it is amazing how many of them are willing to sell or marry off their daughter just so that they can wither pay off gambling debts or continue living a life of idol luxury.

The fathers -

There is the gambler – by connection it is usually safe to assume that he has no money and has a daughter at home trying to keep the account book balanced.

The deathly ill and about to die father – made ill either through overwork (because he wasn’t the first son of a family and had no inheritance so the cash flow isn’t so…flow-ey), through debt (not necessarily from gambling this time – usually it is thanks to some less than honest ‘friend’ who talked him into investing EVERYTHING (because dude! It’s all or nothing) into some scheme that goes belly-up) or from grief thanks to his wife dying.

The clueless father – this is the one that you just want to slap for his cluelessness. He appears to be harmless and loving but in some way he still manages to screw with our heroine’s life.

But it never seems to matter what kind of father he is his daughter always seems to have some kind of maternal view to him. She views him almost as a child who needs to be cared for and protected…

The thing that always stands out the most to me is that at some point these men were the heroes! Their wives thought the world of them and yet they seem so…watery. If the novel was to go beyond happily ever after with our heroine would her hero end up that way? (Just a thought – and a slightly depressing one at that)