Penniless virgins. Reckless dukes. Flappers. Airmen. Suffragettes. Barbara Cartland made them fall in love. She wrote 723 books without touching a typewriter: instead, she reclined on her sofa with a Pekinese on her lap - and romantic fiction billowed out of her.
This dazzling biography reveals the woman behind the powder and mascara - a clever, socially precarious writer navigating a twentieth-century world of war-damaged men, class conflict and sexual peril.
After 49 proposals, she chose the wrong one. What followed was a life stranger than any of her novels.
From country house weekends to Fleet Street offices, from Mayfair bedrooms to the divorce court, Matthew Sweet traces Cartland's extraordinary journey through a century of upheaval. Here are terrorist plots, psychic seances, suppressed scandals, plagiarism battles in the cutthroat world of romance publishing - and a surprising turn as a campaigner for Romany rights.
Drawing on unprecedented access to Cartland's vast archives and firsthand accounts from those who knew her, Sweet delivers a wonderfully entertaining study of class, fame, scandal and self-aggrandisement. Part satire, part biography, part social history, The Great Dictator reveals how a literary legend was made.
As mentioned in a review by the BBC (archived here), there have been quite a few other biographies of Cartland:
She had three authorised biographers in her lifetime, resulting in two gushing hagiographies and one more balanced account, from which Cartland – on seeing the manuscript – promptly withdrew her approval and fast-tracked a sanitised memoir of her own to try and divert attention.
I'm not sure which is the "more balanced account" but the ones I know of are:
Thedates would therefore suggest that Heald's is the "more balanced" account. I didn't want to add "gushing" works to this database, though, which is why none of these have their own entry. Dr Matthew Sweet is a historian, though, which is why I did want to add his, and then I thought I'd take the opportunity to list the others.
Here's the abstract:
As mentioned in a review by the BBC (archived here), there have been quite a few other biographies of Cartland:
I'm not sure which is the "more balanced account" but the ones I know of are:
Cloud, Henry, 1979. Barbara Cartland: Crusader in Pink. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. (For some reason when reprinted by Bloomsbury the author's name is given as John Pearson, but Henry Cloud's is given on an inner page).
Robyns, Gwen, 1985. Barbara Cartland: an authorised biography. New York: Doubleday.
Heald, Tim, 1994. A Life of Love: The Life of Barbara Cartland. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
Cartland herself published:
Cartland, Barbara, 1970. We Danced All Night: A Dazzling Memoir of the Glittering Twenties.
Cartland, Barbara, 1994. I Reach for the Stars: An Autobiography.
The dates would therefore suggest that Heald's is the "more balanced" account. I didn't want to add "gushing" works to this database, though, which is why none of these have their own entry. Dr Matthew Sweet is a historian, though, which is why I did want to add his, and then I thought I'd take the opportunity to list the others.