Note: This article is from the Guardian.

This article titled “Barbara Cartland stole plots, rival author alleged in furious letters” was written by Dalya Alberge, for The Guardian on Thursday 4th August 2011 15.59 UTC

Dame Barbara Cartland, whose romantic novels have already sold over a billion copies worldwide, faced furious allegations of plagiarism, previously unpublished letters that were sent in 1950 reveal. The writer Georgette Heyer accused Cartland of trying to “cash in” on her work and of acting like “a petty thief”.

Heyer, who died in 1974, was an equally successful queen of historical romance who prided herself on her period research. She believed that Cartland – who by her death in 2000 had written more than 700 books, mostly set in the 19th century – had copied names, characters and plot details from her own work.

Unpublished correspondence from 1950 reveals Heyer’s outrage at discovering from a fan the similarities between, among others, Cartland’s Knave of Hearts – the third part of a Georgian trilogy – and her own These Old Shades, a Georgian romance novel.

Heyer wrote 56 novels that sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. She did not regard imitation as the sincerest form of flattery – firing off angry letters to her literary agent, Leonard Parker Moore, refusing to see why she should permit Cartland to steal her ideas and research.

“I think I could have borne it better had Miss Cartland not been so common-minded, so salacious and so illiterate,” she wrote.

She continued: “For her main theme Miss Cartland has gone solely to These Old Shades but for various minor situations and other characters she has drawn upon four of my other novels.”

The astonishing attack from beyond the grave will be published in October in a book titled Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller.

Its author, Jennifer Kloester, was given unprecedented access to correspondence by Heyer’s family, and was “taken aback” by similarities between the authors. “You can’t doubt the points Georgette was making … She was quite aghast at the borrowings.”

The borrowings extended to character names. Heyer was outraged that Sir Montagu Reversby, in Cartland’s Hazard of Hearts, was like her own Sir Montagu Revesby in Friday’s Child.

Heyer wrote: “On perusing the first two novels of Miss Cartland’s trilogy I was astonished to find the number of identical or infinitesimally altered names and titles … I also found what might best be described as paraphrases of situations I had created, and a suspicious number of Regency cant words, or obsolete turns of speech, all of which I can pinpoint in several of my books.”

Kloester said: “She thought that the case might come to court but what she really wanted was for Knave of Hearts ‘to be withdrawn from circulation, the offending names in her previous works altered, and a profound apology made to me’.”

A solicitor’s letter to Cartland followed. Kloester said: “There is no record of a response … but Georgette later noted that ‘the horrible copies of my books ceased abruptly’.” Knave of Hearts was eventually reissued under a new title, The Innocent Heiress, and a heading: “In the tradition of Georgette Heyer”.

Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, senior editor at Arrow, a Random House imprint that is publishing the new biography, said that had Heyer taken legal action today “she’d have a very good case”.

But Cartland’s son, Ian McCorkindale, said: “I’ve never heard that story. It’s more likely, I would have thought, the other way round.”

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