The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet review – the life of Barbara Cartland

An excellent, compassionate biography of the wildly prolific romantic novelist Barbara Cartland was famous for dictating her novels.

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.

“In this way,” she told one of the many reporters who quizzed her on her astonishing productivity, “the typescript for an 80,000-word novel is finished in a fortnight.” At her peak she was pushing out 23 books a year which added up to 723 in total.

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.

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