The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland

by Matthew Sweet

Penniless virgins. Reckless dukes. Flappers. Airmen. Suffragettes. Barbara Cartland made them fall in love. She wrote 723 books without touching a typewriter: instead, she reclined on her sofa with a Pekinese on her lap - and romantic fiction billowed out of her.

This dazzling biography reveals the woman behind the powder and mascara - a clever, socially precarious writer navigating a twentieth-century world of war-damaged men, class conflict and sexual peril.

After 49 proposals, she chose the wrong one. What followed was a life stranger than any of her novels.

From country house weekends to Fleet Street offices, from Mayfair bedrooms to the divorce court, Matthew Sweet traces Cartland's extraordinary journey through a century of upheaval. Here are terrorist plots, psychic seances, suppressed scandals, plagiarism battles in the cutthroat world of romance publishing - and a surprising turn as a campaigner for Romany rights.

Drawing on unprecedented access to Cartland's vast archives and firsthand accounts from those who knew her, Sweet delivers a wonderfully entertaining study of class, fame, scandal and self-aggrandisement. Part satire, part biography, part social history, The Great Dictator reveals how a literary legend was made

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

320 pages, Hardcover

Published September 10, 2026

About the author

Matthew Sweet is an English journalist, broadcaster, author, and cultural historian. A graduate of the University of Oxford, where he earned a doctorate on Wilkie Collins, he has contributed to The Oxford Companion to English Literature and served as a film and television critic for The Independent on Sunday.
Sweet has written extensively on British cinema, most notably in Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema (2005), a history of Shepperton Studios and the early British film industry, which was later adapted into a television documentary. His other books include Inventing the Victorians (2001), which challenges common misconceptions about the Victorian era, and The West End Front (2011), a history of London’s grand hotels during World War II. He has also explored Cold War intrigue in Operation Chaos (2018).
A prominent broadcaster, Sweet has presented numerous BBC television and radio programmes, including Silent Britain, Checking into History, and British Film Forever. He is the host of BBC Radio 3’s Sound of Cinema, which examines film scores and composers, and has been a regular presenter on Free Thinking (formerly Night Waves). His BBC Radio 4 series The Philosopher's Arms explores philosophical themes before a live audience.
A lifelong Doctor Who fan, Sweet has written several audio dramas and short stories set in the Doctor Who universe and has presented numerous documentaries on the series, including Me, You and Doctor Who for the 50th anniversary. He has also conducted in-depth interviews with key figures from the show for its DVD and Blu-ray releases.

Reviews

[Rachel N]

If you grew up in the UK in the 70s and 80s as I did, you would unquestionably have known who Barbara Cartland was – a slightly mad old woman, head to toe in pink, caked in the most ridiculous make up you’d ever seen and the author of what seemed like half of the books in your local library (the other half was probably Catherine Cookson). She appeared on chat shows, became the step grandmother of Princess Diana and was to most of us just an old aristocrat who wrote fairly awful romances at an alarming rate.

After reading Matthew Sweet’s brilliant new biography of her, I’m not entirely sure that impression is altogether wrong but the life that took her to that point is a fabulous read and full of surprises, including the fact that the thick mascara she always wore was actually boot polish and that fans of her books included Anwar Sadat and Colonel Gadaffi, who put £50,000 behind the counter of Foyle’s to ensure he received her new works.

Barbara was born in 1901 into a wealthy family which lost its money after her grandfather’s suicide, a situation made worse when her father was killed in the First World War, leaving behind Barbara, her two brothers (both killed in the Second World War) and her mother Polly. They were certainly an unusual family, very frank in their conversations with each other and never knocked down for long, particularly the women. Polly was a force of nature (she drove to the shops at 25mph and then double parked if she couldn’t find a policeman to park for her) and this certainly passed down to her daughter and granddaughter, Raine, who had a very complicated relationship with her mother.

There are too many fascinating details to cover here as she faces all sorts of challenges, particularly continual financial problems which she kept at bay by dictating her novels to a secretary “with the zeal of a tractor factory during Stalin’s first Five Year Plan”. Her treatment of her daughter is often terrible but she was also behind the organisation of a pool of wedding dresses that brides could borrow for their wedding days during the Second World War and, while on the local council, fought hard for the rights of gypsies in her area. She once said, “Quite early on, I learned the best way to survive is to pretend that anything unpleasant simply hasn’t happened” and you can see that in her actions for better and for worse.

There have been biographies written about Cartland before, some with her input, but none had such unlimited access to the archive and it’s to Matthew Sweet’s advantage that Barbara is no longer there to distort things to her advantage. It’s a superb book, pacy, funny and really paints a complete portrait of the subject, a picture I don’t feel we ever really had when she was just the figure of fun. It’s hard to like her, certainly, but she led a hell of a life and it’s a story beautifully told here. Very highly recommended.

Thanks to Netgalley, the author and publisher for an advance copy in return for an honest review.

[Alex Sarll]

My baseline interest in Barbara Cartland was nil: one of the few writers to make Adrian Tchaikovsky look like a slacker, possibly the only Little Britain sketch target which even now nobody feels the need to apologise for, subject closed. But if Matthew Sweet thinks a topic is worth further exploration, then I generally find myself agreeing; hell, I once saw him give a very entertaining talk about Crossroads*. So his name was enough for me to request this from Netgalley and, true to form, I've been bending people's ears with snippets from it ever since.

It's not that Sweet wants to upturn the image of a ludicrously prolific meringue; by the point you're picturing her, she is pretty much what you're picturing. Rather, he fills in the story before and behind that, giving us a figure whose dates would only need to shift very slightly to be a century baby, and who across that span crosses paths with a remarkable variety of people. Some of them are to be expected, given her background, like the various entanglements with royalty; leaving descriptions of the same parties as Noel Coward; or getting romantically mixed up with a Lygon years before their Madresfield inspired Waugh's Brideshead. Beaverbrook, a bouncing baby John Julius Norwich, even the schoolgirl sapphic flirtation that puts her two degrees from Bloomsbury sure. But then you get the curveballs like Nell Dunn, or how Cartland's daughter Raine – who, even before becoming Diana's stepmother, was for a time the more famous one – having her wallpaper designed by the same person who'd define the look of Kubrick's Overlook Hotel. Even the not-quites; when Barbara's grandfather killed himself and plunged the family into poverty, basically the inciting incident for her life and those hundreds of books about marrying into wealth, one of the physicians treating him was a Sir John Ballance. Obviously not the same man, not even the same spelling...but if there wasn't a Cartland book called Love's Secret Domain, there could have been, couldn't there? And she was quite the mystic herself, not just the easy woo of astrology and séances but the slightly classier woo of theosophy, with her early books especially sometimes talking of love in terms of the fourth dimension.

Speaking of the books, and how can one not, it would normally be a poor show by a biographer of a writer not to have read all the books, but come on. You get the sense that Sweet has made a decent sampling of the imperial phase, but he goes into more depth on the earlier, more idiosyncratic ones, some of them marked as not for republication. Which is a shame, as one or two from her flapper years sound like they might actually be quite interesting, in a Green Hat sort of way. What he has also done is delve into her archives, it would seem pretty exhaustively, and in a way that brings out her contradictions without coming across as a hit job. Most blatantly, there's the way she wrote about women submitting to their husbands, talked about the evils of women having careers, while so spectacularly not embodying that ideal in the slightest. A juggernaut of a personality, she even insisted on copy approval when interviewed, deeply unusual in the 20th century UK press. And some of her positions had themselves changed a great deal over time; no, she's hardly the first or last person to drift right as she got older, but that horror of socialism (ie Labour) which was in place by mid-century stands in stark contrast to a youth where she'd been called a socialist herself after being outraged by the conditions in poor areas of Birmingham when her brother was campaigning to become an MP there. A Conservative MP, true, but the good sort they've pretty much purged now, though even then he got in trouble for his fervently anti-appeasement stance. In fact, Ronald Cartland, like Raine later, makes this almost a dual biography for a stretch, and deservedly so, Barbara's acceptance of his fairly overt homosexuality a long way from her later boasts (and why on Earth would you cop to it?) of inspiring John Major's Back to Basics clusterfuck. Even in later life, she could be fierce in the face of perceived injustice, and if masterminding a scheme to provide wedding dresses for Forces brides was fairly on-brand, I was more surprised at her fighting local prejudice and bureaucratic obstruction to provide facilities for gypsy families.

The point isn't to claim that actually Barbara Cartland was woke, aaaah; more to catch an unusual life in all its everything. Indeed, Sweet is mostly punctilious about not pointing out modern parallels even where he must have spotted them, as in the way Barbara's parallel promotion of traditional values and dubious nutritional supplements prefigures the activities of so many later and less amusing figures. About as far as he ventures into the current century here is to note that you don't even see her books in charity shops anymore, and it's almost too neat that she recorded a welcome video for her website (set up by a neighbour who also wrote songs for Hot Chocolate, because why wouldn't it be) but never lived to see it go online. Looking back from there, though, what a vista! Doomed young men with silly ass Drones names like Bunny Tattersall and Pingo Langrishe, but who threaten to shoot themselves almost as punctuation. Cameos for "an old Harrovian ghost-hunter who claimed to have freed the actor Michael Elphick from a spectral white lady", "a bad-tempered and incontinent monkey", and an early patron who believed the Crucifixion took place just outside outside Edinburgh. Even the description of her contemporary Dennis Wheatley as writing characters who "eat as if training for the gout Olympics"! You don't have to be interested in Barbara Cartland to enjoy this, just twentieth century Britain.

*The bridge was its alleged links to a Doctor Who novelisation, obviously. What is it that creates this overlap between Who fandom and Crossroads celebration, also seen in RTD's Nolly? And if you're about to make a gag about the quality of the sets, be aware that it may constitute hate speech unless it's coming from inside the tent. I should probably also have guessed, though it doesn't get mentioned until the acknowledgements, that Sweet's engagement with Cartland began by way of Who too.

[Chris L.]

Matthew Sweet’s ‘The Great Dictator’ is a fantastic surprise. I had no idea I would be interested in reading a biography of Barbara Cartland. I’m not a romance novel reader, and I know Cartland from all the unkind things said about her over the years. She has always been described as a bit of an anachronistic joke. Sweet’s new biography rescues her from all that negativity, and he gives us an incredibly complicated and fascinating woman.

Sweet has access to Cartland’s papers, letters, and personal effects, so he was able to get closer to the real Cartland than most biographers. Sweet repeatedly reminds us that Cartland liked to create a version of herself to portray to an audience. Sweet goes through her amazing background, and how she was the mistress of self-invention. She reminds me a bit of the British version of Mae West. Someone who found a persona and stuck with it, and she would not allow anything to puncture that persona. I admire that kind of tenacity in Cartland.

Like most self-invented writers, she came from a background of financial insecurity. Sweet touches on this in the book. He shows how this trauma was often the catalyst for her need to control the financial world in her fiction and real life. Cartland was often looked down on for maintaining this obsession with money, aristocracy, fame, the good life, etc. but when you’ve struggled, you do not forget that struggle. Cartland could use fiction and her image as a way to never return to that difficult time in her life.

Sweet does not give us a hagiographic look at Cartland. She does not come across as liking women very much and he points out that flaw in her character. She did not care for the women’s movement, but I would suggest that the women’s movement would not be needed in Cartland’s world if the woman were to be taken care of by a rich man. She felt comfort in men because she saw freedom in the patriarchal structures. Yet she controlled the narrative of Barbara Cartland the public figure. She was for powerful women as long as the powerful women were named Barbara Cartland.

Like most biographies, Sweet often gives us too many details or spends too many pages on a particular topic, but that’s a minor quibble. It’s more important that we now have a biography that rescues Barbara Cartland from the joke culture that minimised her accomplishments. ‘The Great Dictator’ is a first-rate biography.

[Penelope Pitstop]

A marvellous read and a quite astonishing life. Full of absurd details, it traces her from her Edwardian childhood to the rackety 1920s world of impoverished poshoes to the heartbreak of losing her beloved brother in WW2 and then that extraordinarily productive writing career. Cartland emerges as a force of nature and a woman of surprising talents and enthusiasms.

The kindle version has a few minor typos that I’m sure will get fixed in due course.