'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........

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