It’s all for love as Spain’s Barbara Cartland finally gets a chance to woo British readers

Corín Tellado is famed throughout the Spanish-speaking world for her light romance novellas

The giants of bestselling Spanish-language fiction – the chroniclers of deluded chivalry, intellectual and psychological labyrinths and the odd dynasty condemned to a solitudinous century – enjoy a formidable worldwide reputation. Miguel de Cervantes, Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez are known well beyond their homelands.

Not so Corín Tellado. This remarkable and unassuming Asturian author, who died in 2009, produced more than 4,000 works during a six-decade career. If she has an equivalent in the English-speaking world, it is Barbara Cartland rather than George Eliot. But her escapist tales of love and loss, suffering and redemption, have sold more than 400m copies – and a great deal more than that if the millions of pirated Latin American editions are counted. In 1962, Unesco declared her the most-read Spanish author alongside Cervantes.

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