Real Barbara Cartland revealed as archive unlocked - virile lovers to reason for wild make-up

Dame Barbara Cartland’s legacy is a numbers game. She wrote 723 books, sold over 750 million of them, had 49 marriage proposals and is the third most read author of all time. This year marks 125 years since the romance author was born, and a biography – The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet – shines a light on the woman behind the pink chiffon dress. Matthew, a historian and writer, says: “She is probably the best-known romance author of all time. She did write the brilliantly odd Health Food Cookery Book in 1971, suggesting buttercream and liver for longevity. “She holds the Guinness World Record for writing the most novels in a year – an astonishing 23 in 1976. She could write one in a fortnight. She’d start work at 1.30pm, dictate 8,000 words to her secretary before 4.30, then clock off.” Barbara’s most popular and enduring novels include A Hazard of Hearts in 1949, The Wicked Marquis in 1973, and 1978’s The Duke and the Preacher’s Daughter. She would wear a bright pink gown to lay prone on a chaise lounge with her pampered pekingese as she reeled off her romance novels to a secretary who would type them up. Her larger than life persona has been parodied many times – most memorably by Matt Lucas on comedy sketch show Little Britain. It was all true, says Matthew, who adds she was very canny in the way she presented herself. He says: “She was very smart about the way that she marketed herself. She created this very strong image which is extreme and a bit ridiculous really, isn’t it? But we all remember it.” But behind it there was a lot of control. Matthew says: “She didn’t like if she displayed emotion in an interview. She always crossed that out. She’s also crossed out any swearing, although she had quite the potty mouth at times.” He says: “She lay on the sofa, words flowed out of her, and a secretary who wasn’t allowed to look her in the eye or cough, sneeze, breathe audibly or wear anything eye-catching took down these words that Barbara thought of as coming in almost from another dimension. “She had a lot of occult beliefs, so for her it was a slightly mystical or magical process. She was probably the last person alive to believe in maternal impression, a disproven theory that a pregnant woman’s thoughts, emotions, or intense physical experiences could physically mark or alter her developing child. Before she gave birth to [first child] Raine, she stared for hours at a picture of a beautiful baby. She was convinced it worked.” Matthew’s memoir draws on a lifetime of records, kept by Barbara at her home of Camfield Place in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. But it’s only been made possible since her death in 2000. He says: “There have been memoirs before, but she nobbled them. She either seduced them by being really nice to them or she went to war with them. “She demanded copy approval and would try to rewrite, adding extra pages. She was so angry about that last one that she lay down on the sofa and dictated a spoiler memoir to deliberately put out at the same time.” But The Great Dictator has the blessing of Barbara’s estate. Matthew says: “After her son Ian died in February 2023, I sent a note to his daughter, Tara, expressing my condolences, and she said: ‘Oh, just come over,’ and threw the whole archive open to me. It hasn’t been touched in a quarter of a century. “Everything is there. She didn’t throw anything away. Her Tippex is still there, as is the secretary’s typewriter and reams of blank notepaper.” In her 70s, Barbara began to lose her sight and hearing. Matthew says: “She didn’t like any reference to her saying ‘what’ or ‘pardon’. There are surviving dictation and interview tapes which show she found voices in higher registers much harder to hear than those in lower registers. “She’s often saying to the secretaries quite briskly to ‘speak lower’.Losing her sight partly explains something of the oddness of her appearance, too, because she’s putting all this makeup on without quite being able to see what she’s doing.” Barbara, born in July 1901 in Birmingham, was a pioneer of women’s fiction, publishing her first book in 1925 and entertaining fans through the Second World War. She famously said her heroines “never go to bed without a ring on their fingers – not until page 118 at least.” Matthew says: “She inspired so many. Bridgerton is like Barbara but with sex a bit earlier on in the book. A common theme was a woman marrying the wrong man. Fate has to find a way of killing him usually in order for her to marry the one she really really wants. There’s a lot of very convenient plane crashes.” Life mirrored art in some ways. Barbara wed Alexander McCorquodale from 1927 to 1933, and they had Raine, who later became Princess Diana’s stepmother. She then married Alexander’s cousin Hugh McCorquodale in 1936. After welcoming sons Ian and Glen, he died in 1963 following years of ill health related to war wounds suffered at the Battle of the Somme. However, Barbara publicly claimed Raine was actually the biological daughter of Prince George, who died in a plane crash in 1942 while serving in the Second World War. Matthew laughs: “A shockingly large proportion of men who Barbara went out with died in plane crashes, car crashes or threatened to shoot themselves if she didn’t marry them. They were a traumatised generation. “Barbara generally demanded a proposal if you wanted to make out with her. And she carefully kept a record of all of these men. There’s an album which has photographs of most of them with remarks like, ‘wanted to marry me’ or ‘boring’ or ‘killed in an air crash that many believed to have been caused by a flying saucer’.” Modern romance writers see Barbara as a millstone. Matthew says: “She was a genre unto herself and there’s this paradox about her that she’s still the third best-selling author in history, but she’s not much read today. “In a way, her readers died with her. Her legacy is everything that she did for those readers – two generations of women. She was a really important writer for millions and millions – readers who might only have read Barbara Cartland. *The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland by Matthew Sweet is out tomorrow, published by Hodder & Stoughton.