Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland was one of the most successful writers of romance novels of all time, with estimated worldwide sales of one billion copies in thirty-six languages. Cartland published her first novel, Jigsaw, in 1923, aslightly naughty society thriller that became a bestseller. She quickly became one of the United Kingdom’s most popular media personalities, and by 1983 she rated the top-selling author in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records. In the mid-1990s, by which time she had sold over a billion books, Vogue magazine called her ‘the true Queen of Romance’. She died in year 2000, at the age of ninety-eight.