The Great Dictator : A Life of Barbara Cartland

Author: Matthew Sweet

20th century

Published on 10 September 2026 by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 496 pages, 2 x 8pp plate sections
164 x 242 x 42 | 762g

'Matthew Sweet has given the life-story of this icon of chiffon-and-pearls the telling it deserves - wry, affectionate, and very readable.' Louis Theroux'The most genius, compelling, jaw-dropping, access-all-areas biography of Barbara Cartland.' India Knight'This book is superb. A psychologically acute rendering of a publishing phenomenon.' Jenny ColganPenniless 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.