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Barbara Cartland was famous for dictating her novels. With a pekingese clamped to her hot pink bosom she would lie back on a library couch and exhale a story about virginal girls taming wayward dukes, damaged airmen or misunderstood surgeons. Meanwhile Miss Savory, Mrs Smith or Mrs Morgan, picked for being unfidgety and sneezeless, would take everything down in immaculate Pitman shorthand. Cartland reckoned on being able to polish off 8,000 words a day. “In this way,” she told one of the many reporters who quizzed her on her astonishing productivity, “the typescript for an 80,000-word novel is finished in a fortnight.” At her peak she was pushing out 23 books a year which added up to 723 in total. Only Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare topped her lifetime sales of 750m.
Cartland was a dictator in other ways, too. Husbands, dogs, houses and the local council were all expected to bend themselves to her indomitable will. Resistance, let alone opposition, was futile. The managing director of the company that printed her books suggested that she read Nietzsche on the perceptive grounds that they had a lot of ideas in common. Oddly, he also declared himself madly in love with her. Behind that marshmallowy exterior, all pink chiffon, candyfloss hair and soft, smudgy lines, there lurked sinews of high-tensile steel.
Anyone expecting this biography of Barbara Cartland to be an amusing takedown of a monstre sacré along the lines of Craig Brown’s witty 2017 decimation of Princess Margaret will be disappointed. Rather, Matthew Sweet pays his subject the compliment of absolute seriousness, regarding her as a cultural phenomenon whose extraordinary life, stretching the entire 20th century, deserves deep study. Sweet has had unfettered access to the cornucopia of material that Cartland left behind at Camfield Place, the Hertfordshire manor house where she lived until her death in 2000 at the age of 98. Conducting a fingertip search of her letters, scrapbooks and typescripts, Sweet has crafted a generous but clear-sighted account of a woman who was too often reduced to the status of a lazy joke.
She was born in 1901 into the lower upper class. On her father’s side she was pure trade. James Cartland and Son was a Birmingham metalworkers turning out umbrella stands, crocodile-shaped inkwells, shelf brackets shaped like sea monsters and “pharaonic letterboxes embossed with meaningless hieroglyphs”. Her adored mother Polly, meanwhile, was Gloucestershire gentry and there had been the usual rows about marrying down. Cartland’s paternal grandfather killed himself when the business went bust and her father retreated into alcoholism, leaving Polly to manage the tricky business of getting her daughter launched into a life the family could no longer afford.
Sweet suggests that this constellation of losses and compensations set the emotional template for Cartland’s adult life. Men were necessary but fragile and certainly best not relied upon. Having come out as a deb in 1919 into a world where there were not enough husbands to go round, Barbara set out to become financially self-sufficient by plunging into the only kind of work for which she was qualified. For the next decade she filed gossipy titbits about young London society to the Express, the Mirror and the Daily Mail.
This was the world of the Bright Young Things, so often written up today as a madcap time of pyjama parties and midnight dashes to the continent. In fact, Cartland’s columns reveal a society still in shock from the first world war: fathers are dead (Cartland lost hers in the trenches in 1918), grand family houses have been sold, divorce is everywhere and life seems impossible without alcohol or drugs. The men whom Cartland stepped out with were not the heart-throb dukes and dashing airmen that she would later write about, but broken people without the language to express their desolation. “My contemporaries were ashamed to show emotion,” she observed with characteristic perception in her 1943 memoir The Isthmus Years. “We had all of us a horror of sympathy.”
So instead she simply carried on with a brittle determination to make the best of things. After plenty of dalliances with men called things like Pingo Langrishe and Nigs Ratendone she made a tactical marriage to a dull man called Alexander McCorquodale who was heir to a printing fortune. When he retreated into drink – shades of her father – she effected a neat swap by divorcing, then marrying his paternal cousin. In this way there was no need to change her surname: she had replaced one Mr McCorquodale with another. It rankled that she never achieved a title until she herself was made a Dame in 1991. By contrast, her ambitious daughter, Raine, managed to insert herself into the peerage not once but three times through each of her carefully strategic marriages.
The only man who really mattered to Cartland was her beloved younger brother, Ronald. They went on holiday together and endlessly discussed the cod-eastern philosophies that were all the rage in the 1920s: Ouspensky and Gurdjieff were favourites and Cartland retained a vague mysticism to the end of her life involving ghosts and spiritual healing. She also believed in flying saucers and the power of honey to cure just about anything.
Brother and sister bonded too over politics, specifically a socially engaged, internationalist Toryism. Barbara bossed Ronald into parliament where he became a leading anti-appeaser. She in turn wrote one of the first of the tiny number of 1930s British novels that dealt specifically with the evils of Nazi antisemitism. Dangerous Experiment (1936) involves the improbable story of Lena Carrington who, after a shipwreck and a spell as the slave of a tribe of thunder-worshippers in the Caucasus, ends up in Germany where she is courted by a Nazi lover. In the end she breaks things off when she sees him mistreating a Jewish refugee.
This, of course, is not the Barbara Cartland that most of us remember from the 80s and beyond. In what Sweet calls her “imperial phase” she was writing novels with paper-thin plots that she endlessly recycled. She was also a relentless self-promoter. Bed linen, candles and towels were all enthusiastically marketed under her name, although with remarkable restraint she drew the line at scented toilet paper. She also pulled off a promotion with Dewhurst the butcher, which offered customers one of six previously unpublished Cartland novels for every £12 they spent. The promotion was not a great success because of the sheer weirdness of “being given a copy of Desire in the Desert with a parcel of mince”.
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But when, in a stroke of fortune so improbable that even now it hardly seems real, her daughter, Raine, became Diana Spencer’s stepmother, Cartland sensed new opportunities for cross-pollination. She took to announcing “I invented virgins” and managed to imply that the royal wedding of 1981 was somehow her doing, despite being pointedly not invited. Raine, a chip off the old block, made sure that the gift shop at the Spencer family seat, Althorp, stocked a full run of Barbara Cartlands.
It would be easy to dismiss Cartland as a quirk, an aberration the likes of which we will not see again. But the great triumph of this brilliant book is the way that Sweet embeds her firmly in the economic, political, social and artistic transformations of the 20th century while charting the ways in which she also transcended them. Somehow, and this remains the deep mystery of it all, Barbara Cartland emerges as that rather admirable thing: an entirely self-made woman.
