'Main character energy': The extraordinary story of Barbara Cartland, the forgotten millions-selling romance author

Although Barbara Cartland sold around 750 million books, you'll struggle to find a copy in a bookshop today. And the socialite led an extraordinary and surprising life - why has the UK's master of romantic fiction disappeared from memory?

To take your place behind William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie as the third best-selling author in history is a remarkable feat. Yet, ask most people what they know of the late romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland and it's probably not her literary success that they'll mention.

Instead, people might recall her penchant for pink, particularly her uniform of billowing, candy-coloured gowns. Or her famously thick, sooty eyelashes (created not with mascara, but boot polish applied with a toothbrush). They might remember that she always had a small dog tucked under her arm, that she reportedly took 90 vitamin pills a day and that she had a famous spat with Jackie Collins on live TV, calling her books "evil". Or that she was the step-grandmother of the late Princess Diana – who loved her books.

Even those who remember a time when Cartland's books were ubiquitous on UK supermarket shelves will likely struggle to recall the titles. Cartland wrote a staggering 723 books in her lifetime – mostly historical romances featuring innocent young heroines trying to tame dashing but troubled dukes, lords and captains.

But a quarter-of-a-century on from her death it is the woman, rather than what she produced on the page, whose presence still lingers.

Much of this is down to Cartland herself, a master of personal branding long before social media made it commonplace, who carefully created and controlled her image. When quarantine restrictions meant she couldn't take her dogs on a US publicity tour, she appeared with a stuffed Pekingese under her arm so as not to shatter the illusion.

Cartland issued journalists with indemnity forms and demanded copy approval on interviews. She had three authorised biographers in her lifetime, resulting in two gushing hagiographies and one more balanced account, from which Cartland – on seeing the manuscript – promptly withdrew her approval and fast-tracked a sanitised memoir of her own to try and divert attention.

A new biography of Cartland out this week would no doubt horrify the woman herself. It goes beyond the perfectly coiffed image to examine properly her extraordinary career and equally remarkable life. "There are all of these things you can say about Barbara Cartland, like she's the third best-selling author of all time, that don't match up with the cultural memory of her," says Matthew Sweet, author of The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland (the title refers to the fact that Cartland didn't type her books, but dictated them to a secretary from her chaise longue). 

"It would be good if she was remembered as something more than a joke. That's not to say she wasn't funny and absurd because she was, but she achieved something that ought to be acknowledged in some way. If you dismiss her, you're also dismissing all her readers too, and there were two post-war generations to whom she was very important."

Cartland's granddaughter Tara McCorquodale gave Matthew Sweet full access to her archives at Camfield Place, the country home where the writer lived from the 1950s until her death. "I had free rein of the whole house and all the papers in it, some of which had not been touched for a quarter-of-a-century," says Sweet.

The result is a book that, while gloriously entertaining and packed with plenty of jaw-dropping anecdotes about Cartland's behaviour, it also places the writer in the context of an era of huge political and social change.

Cartland's life spanned almost the entirety of the 20th Century. Born in 1901, she lived through two world wars, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the women's liberation movement, the UK's first female prime minster and the birth of the internet. She launched her own website a few months before her death in 2000.

Sweet argues that the inciting incident in Cartland's life happened when she was barely two years old and her paternal grandfather killed himself after going bankrupt. His death marked a change in the family's fortunes, with Barbara's parents leaving their grand Worcestershire home for a much more modest life. While her father turned to alcohol, Cartland's mother Polly tried desperately to cling on to their place in high society. As a young woman, this would also preoccupy Barbara who, despite a lack of funds, found herself mixing with the Bright Young Things of the era.

"She didn't have lots of resources to draw from, and so she always had to make the best of herself and just go for everything in this demonically energetic way," says Sweet.

Cartland started her career as a newspaper gossip columnist, before publishing her first novel Jigsaw in 1925, a tale of a young woman who leaves her French convent school and heads to London in search of love.

Her own love life gave her plenty of inspiration to draw from. She fielded 49 marriage proposals before accepting what turned out to be the wrong one. After divorcing her first husband for adultery she then married his cousin, handily keeping the same married name, McCorquodale.

Unlike the historical romances that she later became famous for, her earlier books had contemporary settings. "Some of her early work, particularly her writing in the 1920s and '30s was quite groundbreaking," says Dr Amy Burge, associate professor in Popular Fiction at the University of Birmingham and co-author of The Bonkbuster: Women's Popular Reading in the Long 1980s.

A 1926 play, Blood Money, was initially banned for being too racy. Her 1935 novel First Class Lady featured a character who has an illegal abortion, causing its censorship in Ireland. And 1936's Dangerous Experiment was one of only a handful British novels of the time to address the rise of Nazi antisemitism. 

Cartland's imperial phase came during the golden age of cheap mass market paperbacks in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Publishers were hungry for manuscripts, and Barbara was happy to oblige, producing books at the alarming speed of one a fortnight. "The one author in the world with 150 virgins lying about was me," she said. 

By this point her novels were set in the past, mainly the 19th Century. They were formulaic, but that was part of the appeal. "Repetition is comforting," says Burge. "The joy of a romance novel is that you know it's going to end happily. The anticipation and the pleasure is in how you get there." 

While her fictional worlds often involved high society, Cartland's readers were largely working-class women. "I'm selling millions of paperbacks to women who are on Valium because they're having such a rotten time in real life," she said. "They don't want to read about the kitchen sink, they can look at that any time they're peeling potatoes. I'm their escape. I give them glamour, beautiful clothes, and the marvellous attentive men they are starving for." 

Not every reader was an exhausted housewife: one photograph captured a teenage Diana Spencer reading a Cartland book. The future princess was more than just a fan, though. Barbara's daughter Raine married Diana's father, Earl Spencer, in 1976, making the writer her step-grandmother. 

The peak of Cartland's success coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism – a movement Cartland disapproved of. The feeling was mutual. In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer said Cartland's work was "sterile self-deception".

Sweet argues Cartland's books offered a counterpoint to the social shifts of the time. "When we think of the 1960s we think of this permissive society, but an awful lot of people didn't like that kind of thing," he says. "She was representing those swathes of women who never signed up for feminism in the '60s or '70s and wanted something else. As a historian, you can't dismiss that."

Burge agrees that some women might have found the changes in society overwhelming, and sought comfort in the familiarity of Cartland's worlds – but she also thinks we shouldn't assume her readers craved what was depicted in her books. "Because of their historical setting, her books offered a safe space to play with ideas about submissiveness and dominant masculinity that women didn't necessarily want in their real lives," she says.

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Cartland's own life was full of contradictions. A social climber who loved nothing more than mingling with aristocracy and royalty, she spent her political career – a decade as a Conservative county councillor – championing the causes of those she thought hard done by, from underpaid nurses to neglected care home residents. 

One of her more surprising chapters was when she became a fierce campaigner for the rights of the Romany Gypsy community. Her activism led to the creation of Britain's first permanent Gypsy site – nicknamed Barbaraville.

And while Cartland might have dismissed the feminist movement, she also once argued that women should be paid by the state for domestic labour. "I think this is why she's so interesting because she's impossible to classify," says Sweet.

In 1960, Cartland co-founded the Romantic Novelists Association, an organisation that's still going strong. Romance as a literary genre is currently surging in popularity, especially with young readers, but although Cartland sold 750 million books you'll struggle to find a copy in a bookshop today. 

"They are written for their moment, I think, and they express the desires and wants of a readership who don't exist anymore," says Sweet.

Burge says although Cartland's writing is no longer widely read, she's still seen as a hugely important figure in the world of romantic fiction – not least for bringing more attention to the genre. "She had a very strong sense of brand. I think a large part of her legacy is that of the blockbuster author." 

Cartland once said that "women shouldn't have character… they should be like pretty chocolate boxes" – but she was, and remains, a bigger persona than anyone. "She has this irresistible main character energy that means it's been a total pleasure to write about her," says Sweet. "She never did anything by halves."

The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet is published on 10 September.

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