Picture a woman in a hot-pink chiffon gown lying on an overstuffed couch, talking incessantly. A second woman, one chosen for “her quietness, her stillness, her capacity to suppress a sneeze”, sits nearby, transcribing her employer’s words in impeccable shorthand. (If you’re now visualising Matt Lucas’s Little Britain Barbara Cartland-inspired character Dame Sally Markham, I suspect Matthew Sweet intends you to.)
Cartland dictated up to 7,000 words per afternoon. Between 1925 and 1997, she published 723 books, including 23 in 1976 alone. She maintained her literary output, Sweet writes, “with the zeal of a tractor factory during Stalin’s first Five Year Plan”. Only Shakespeare and Agatha Christie surpass her 750 million sales, yet you would have to look hard to find her novels in a shop today. Her books were written quickly, consumed quickly and discarded.
She came of age during the first World War into a society depleted of men, a “hidden wound” she shared with her contemporaries and readers. She returned to certain themes repeatedly: the misfortunes of her parents, the failure of her first marriage, the boyfriends whose passions she feared (she had 49 marriage proposals before accepting her first husband).
Cartland had three biographers during her lifetime but, as Sweet drily comments, she “seduced or nobbled all of them”. She once circulated a 46-page dossier to newspaper obituary writers called How I Want to Be Remembered. Her aim was to ensure the “untrue and unpleasant things” written about her and her daughter Raine (Princess Diana’s stepmother) would not be repeated in her death notices. But, as Sweet notes, “the record bulged with unpleasant things”.
Sweet had unprecedented access to Cartland’s vast archives and makes excellent use of the material he unearthed. He does a great trade in gossipy nuggets, such as the novelist Isabel Allende being sacked from her job translating Cartland into Spanish after being caught changing the text to make the heroines more assertive.
Part satire, part biography, part social history, The Great Dictator is not intended to send new readers to Cartland’s enormous back catalogue. Rather, it is a sharply enjoyable portrait of a changing society and how one intelligent, vexatious woman broke out of the role expected of her class – and made a fortune by doing so.