'Men with amputated legs make the best lovers.' the outrageous life and lines of Dame Barbara Cartland

Dame Barbara Cartland wrote 723 novels. Except she didn’t. Rather than putting pen to paper, Barbara, recumbent on a couch and clutching a lapdog, dictated for hours to a secretary, who took it all down, 7,000 words a session, a book completed every fortnight. The result, transcribed and typed up by anonymous helpers, was tied up in pink ribbon and delivered in a white Rolls-Royce to the publishers. Page proofs were left for the authoress at Claridge’s, where she lunched every Wednesday.

Dame Barbara Cartland with her white Rolls Royce 

It’s a brave man to take the ‘profoundly neglected’ Barbara seriously, to find artistry and merit in the balderdash – all these stories about virgins searching for husbands and reforming ‘brutal or abusive’ dukes. A typical sentence: ‘His lips were on hers, he felt her quiver, and then there was only a flame sweeping them both away towards a boundless limitless horizon.’

Yet Matthew Sweet is that brave man, who claims to have set about his biographical task in a mood of ‘admiration, regard and respect’. This is astonishing really, when you remember Barbara appearing on chat shows in her theatrical or clownish get-up: pink chiffon cocktail gowns, ropes of pearls, a thinning nimbus of hair. Barbara at least knew she could be mistaken for a female impersonator, and refused to meet Danny La Rue in case people made a comparison.

She belongs I think in the high camp company of Dame Edna Everage, Fanny Cradock, the ‘Fat Lady’ cook Jennifer Paterson, April Ashley and Barbara Woodhouse, the dog trainer – women who were never in less than imposing full-sail regal mode.

Given the run of Barbara’s old mansion in Hertfordshire, untouched since her death in May 2000, Sweet has examined correspondence and clippings files, photographs, documents and memorabilia. From this archival mass also coming to light were (Christ!) the unpublished typescripts of 151 more novels.

Her family came from Edgbaston and were owners of a brass foundry in Birmingham manufacturing hinges, umbrella stands and crocodile-shaped inkwells.

Cartland and Alexander McCorquodale on their wedding day in 1927

Barbara was born in 1901 into a world of wealth and comfort – a villa with a minstrel’s gallery, maids, grooms, gardeners – which ended abruptly when her grandfather, James Frank Howard Cartland, lost everything following bad investments in a Welsh railway scheme. He then shot himself. His son, Barbara’s father, Bertie, ‘seemed to regard the idea of working for a living as a baffling impossibility’, and it is hard to discern from this biography where funds kept coming from, as even though all the family furniture was auctioned off, Barbara was always able to enjoy attending clubs, dances and balls.

What we are told is that despite the Cartland’s ‘social and economic uncertainty’, they moved to a farmhouse in Worcestershire, and Barbara’s mother, Polly, became honorary secretary of the Worcestershire Needlework Guild. Bertie, briefly private secretary for a Conservative association, was killed by shellfire in the First World War.

Though Barbara was sent to boarding school in Malvern and finishing school in Hampshire, she had no real education. She enjoyed performing in concerts for wounded troops and came of age in a world depleted of eligible men: 796,000 fewer in 1918 than 1914.

Those who survived the trenches, and who were turned into the heroes and anti-heroes in Barbara’s books, were eccentrics and risk-takers, ebullient morphine-addicted bright young things going in for soda-siphon battles and tobogganing down the stairs on tea-trays. She received 49 proposals of marriage from such gents. There was Sir Hercules Langrishe and his son Pingo; Ernest Simpson – Barbara was almost the Mrs Simpson before Wallis; Dick Ussher, who threatened Barbara with a loaded gun – and when he did marry, he took a gun on honeymoon ‘and used it to shoot an elephant in the Belgian Congo’; Jimmy Dunn, who thought beard clippings were carcinogenic and cleaned his teeth with salt…

In 1927 she married Alexander ‘Sachie’ McCorquodale, owner of a printing works. ‘They charmed each other, and once the charm wore off, neither admired what remained.’ They had a daughter, Raine, who ‘tried Barbara’s patience’. Yet with her big hair and glassy smiles, she became like a heroine in a Cartland novel, marrying, first, the Earl of Dartmouth, and secondly, Earl Spencer – meaning she became Princess Diana’s stepmother. Barbara was to cash in on the connection, with innumerable interviews. She was not invited to the Royal Wedding.

When Sachie had an affair with the sister of another of Barbara’s admirers, Glen Kidston, divorce ensued. Sachie spent two years in a ‘home for inebriates’ in Shropshire. Barbara married his cousin, Hugh McCorquodale, in 1936. Hugh ‘could be quite ardent’ – because, Barbara maintained, he’d suffered in the war: ‘Men with amputated legs make the best lovers.’ Something to do with where all the blood now must flow.

During the Second World War, Barbara was briefly in Canada with the children, but returned to work for the Auxiliary Territorial Service and St John Ambulance, organising a scheme for brides to borrow wedding dresses. Her greatest fear was being bombed when in the bath, as then she’d be in the nude.

In her books Barbara promised ‘transcendental ecstasies’ to women readers, if only they’d bow down before the superiority of the male species.

She was not shy of describing lots of sado-masochistic horsewhipping and, frankly, rapes. Barbara’s views, indeed, are so shocking today, they are comical. ‘No man wants a clever woman,’ she insisted. ‘A stupid man is preferable to a clever woman.’ Feminists, when they came along, were ‘man-hating, embittered, sex-starved spinsters’.

It never seemed to occur to Barbara that she was herself a clever and industrious woman, very much the boss, wearing the trousers. Yet still she peddled her fantasies. ‘Arab men can’t get enough of the sort of girl I write about,’ and Barbara claimed Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Colonel Gaddafi were fans – as was (for the record) Hyacinth Bucket.

‘Barbara was the centre of her own universe,’ says Sweet. This cannot be denied. She consulted astrologers and spirit mediums, to ensure the cosmos was running to order. She rose above the wisdom of conventional medicine with her beliefs in yeast extract and her evangelism for vitamin pills, which could apparently reform juvenile delinquents, help learner drivers pass their tests, and save sexless marriages. Swallowing 90 vitamin pills a day gave Barbara acute diverticulitis.

She remained a wonderful snob. A reporter asked her whether the relationships between the classes had altered during her lifetime. ‘Of course they have, or I wouldn’t be talking to you.’ Brilliant – as on the whole is this book, which is compiled with much wit and verve.