Barbara Cartland: Give Pink a Chance

The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet

published 2026

 

Writing about the Royals for the I newspaper recently, I picked up Matthew Sweet’s new biography of Barbara Cartland, marvellously titled The Great Dictator. I am a big fan of Matthew Sweet’s writing (click on the tag to find more from him), and although I was initially looking for the Dame’s connections with the royals - she was Princess Diana’s stepgrandmother, and a good friend of Lord Mountbatten - the book was hugely enjoyable all the way through.

She was an extraordinary character, who lived an extraordinary life, and the book does her full justice. She is famous for her romance novels, her huge rate of production, her fondness for pink, her health claims, her psychic interests, her opinions on everything and willingness to be endlessly interviewed by people who weren’t taking her seriously. She dictated her books to a secretary, while lying on a chaise longue, swathed in pink.

She nicely spanned the 20^th century – 1901-2000, and while everything you have heard about her is true, there was more to her than seems at first glance, and by the end of the book I was full of admiration and warm feelings for her. She was not wholly reliable in reporting her own life, Sweet takes apart some of her fabrications – she was forever changing, for example, the number of men who had proposed to her, and making wild claims for things he had invented and done first and introduced.

But still – what a woman. She had endless interests, she knew everyone she was apparently tireless. She had some mad views (eugenics, space aliens), and some very Right wing views, but she also had a warmth, a kind heart, and a belief in doing what was right. I was astonished to read how she took the cause of some local gypsies to heart, and worked hard – and successfully - over a long period of time to get them a place to camp and a chance for education for children.

One of the men who proposed to her was in Young and Innocent, an early Hitchcock film we have covered here on the blog… Another is described thus by her: “Pilot in the Meopham Air Disaster which is still suspected of being caused by creatures from outer space”. She even – talking of Royals – was almost kissed by Ernest Simpson before he married Wallis who later became Duchess of Windsor.

Her own family life was peculiar, and not much resembling those of her heroines. She was very close with her mother Polly, and exceptionally so with her brother Ronald, who was gay and died in WW2. She married twice, and had three children. Sweet says this

Perhaps it would be best to think of the relationship between Barbara and her daughter as a finishing school in which the classes went on for ever and the work was never done, and neither pupil nor teacher could escape from Switzerland.

--this was Raine, who married Diana Spencer’s divorced father Johnnie, to the disdain of his children.

Raine as debutante

The number of books Barbara Cartland produced is truly startling, even if she hadn’t had whole other lives in voluntary work, local government, welfare work, agony aunt. The woman never stopped.

Sweet, always good with a phrase, says this:

Her successors in the field – talented professionals who write passionate stories that sometimes involve lovers in buccaneer boots or whalebone corsets – have become accustomed to people asking if they work from bed with a lapdog and a box of violet creams. They know that Barbara represents romantic fiction as Dracula represents vampires, and that she has proved equally impossible to kill.

She wrote more than 700 books – the exact number is hard to pin down – and did sell a lot of them: financial details equally hard to pin down.

It is a great regret for me that I never interviewed her in my young days as a journalist – too busy talking to important politicians and others in public life, long forgotten and no-one is writing books about them now. Interviews with Cartland turned up in magazines and newspapers on a very regular basis, all much the same but all enjoyable. As Sweet describes:

Journalists came to Camfield to see a fabulous beast in her natural habitat. A day with Barbara, however, was more like being a mouse in a Skinner box than David Attenborough on the trail of the Komodo dragon. By 1970, she had perfected the process – the compendious briefing document, tied in pink ribbon and sent out in advance, detailing Barbara’s greatest achievements; the chauffeur despatched in the white Rolls-Royce (registration bc 29) to St Albans or Hatfield station; the audience itself, during which the visitor, if sufficiently skilful, would get a word in edgeways; the afternoon tea with the Pekingese beneath the table, poised to receive a choux bun; the parting present of a bundle of paperbacks and a gold-painted acorn from the Elizabethan oak.

 

Oh but Matthew Sweet is the man for the brilliant detail:

She confessed that she no longer threw up her arms and declared “Look at me!” when people asked her about the benefits of vitamins, because on her most recent trip to India she had done this and fallen down the steps of the Taj Mahal.

He says he was allowed unprecedented access to her files and archives and correspondence in her own home: which had been virtually untouched since her death. He says sadly that no-one writing a biography is ever likely to have records and letters, notebook and manuscripts in quite that way again.

But still the credit goes to him for writing such an entertaining, clear-eyed and fair-minded biography. It is a joy to read.

Her books, and the thorny question of comparisons with Georgette Heyer, will need another entry…