Matthew Sweet’s new biography reconsiders Barbara Cartland as more than a romance machine
A review in The Guardian Books says Matthew Sweet’s biography takes Barbara Cartland seriously, tracing the extraordinary discipline, commercial power and force of will behind one of the 20th century’s most prolific writers. The book also recasts Cartland as a literary phenomenon whose influence still invites comparison with the biggest names in publishing history.
Barbara Cartland’s public image was so overpowering that it often threatened to eclipse the writing behind it: the pink chiffon, the pekingese, the theatrical romance, the impossible volume of work. But a new biography by Matthew Sweet, reviewed in The Guardian Books, is said to do what Cartland herself rarely received: treat her as a serious subject rather than a joke, and show how much calculation sat beneath the glamour.
Cartland became famous for dictating her novels while reclining on a library couch, with a pekingese pressed against her hot pink bosom and a secretary — chosen, the review says, for being unfidgety and sneezeless — taking everything down in Pitman shorthand. The process was part performance, part factory system. Cartland believed she could produce 8,000 words a day, and explained to reporters that in this way “the typescript for an 80,000-word novel is finished in a fortnight.”