Barbara Cartland

The only big-time glitzy author I ever met. And that hardly. Barbara Cartland (1901-2000) was a fixture at the Christmas parties given by the parents of one of my university friends who lived in Hatfield (as she did). At these dos she’d latch onto some poor undergraduate, and assure him he needed to get more sex. Given the times I’m referring to, this advice, especially coming as it did from an elderly lady, was as shocking as it was no doubt necessary. We spent most of our time dodging her. In The Independent Matthew Sweet, author of a new biography, asks the question Barbara Cartland sold millions. Why is it so hard to find her novels in shops today? His biography is published this month by Hodder & Stoughton at £25. “Between 1925 and her death in 2000, Cartland wrote 723 books, most of them [644] romantic novels – a huge body of work that began with Jigsaw (1925), the story of an innocent navigating the sexual hazards of Mayfair, and ended with In Love in Lucca (1997), the story of…