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.
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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
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