Armour Against Love

Armour Against Love is a novel by Barbara Cartland, published in 1970. It opens with Christine reading a letter she can hardly believe, because it offers her a way back to the place she came from.

Her brother has died and left three orphaned children, and Christine is asked to return to her childhood home to care for them. Twenty years earlier she had run away with a married actor, and the village she would be returning to has not forgotten the scandal. The letter is the first thing anybody has offered her in years.

The years since have not been kind to her. Hunger, failure and the loss of love have altered the golden-haired beauty she used to be, although she is still described as a starry-eyed girl waiting for miracles to happen.

She makes the journey home anyway, and the novel is about what she finds there: a new kind of life, and a community that has already decided what she is. The title is the choice she has to make about whether to let love back in.