Barbara Taylor Bradford was a giant of postwar British literature. Her 40 novels sold more than 91mn copies and she transformed the landscape of fiction, writing books about women who — like their author — set themselves goals which they achieved and surpassed. Her first novel, A Woman of Substance, was published in 1979 when she was 46 years old: like Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx, Penelope Fitzgerald and many other eminent women writers, success came after 40.
The first volume of what became the Emma Harte Saga was a rags-to-riches tale about a poor maidservant who rises to become the founder of one of the world’s most successful department store chains. At the apex of her career, Taylor Bradford’s heroine remembers advice she was once given: “We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.” A Woman of Substance spent 43 weeks in The New York Times bestseller lists: its author accepted the accolades. Her final book, The Wonder of it All, was published just last year.
She was born in Upper Armley, Leeds, in 1933 to Winston and Freda Taylor. Her father, an engineer, had lost a leg in the first world war; her mother worked as a children’s nurse and nanny. Before Barbara was born, her parents lost a little boy, Vivian, to meningitis: “My mother put all her frustrated love into me,” she later said. She was at nursery school with another Yorkshire-born literary titan, Alan Bennett — but it was to Freda that she credited her love of literature and her determination. She could read before she was four and was “force-fed” Dickens. She was first published at the age of 10, when her mother sent a story she wrote to a children’s magazine. She was paid seven shillings and sixpence, and her career had begun.
Taylor Bradford at the age of three with her mother, Freda
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Taylor Bradford pictured at the age of 17
Bradford Enterprises/PA WireHer parents wished for her to go to university: instead, at 16 she got a job as a typist at the Yorkshire Evening Post. She started sneaking stories on to the subeditors’ desks — soon enough she was a reporter, the only woman in the newsroom. She worked alongside Keith Waterhouse, author of Billy Liar and the screenplay for Whistle Down the Wind, who took her under his wing; she met another reporter there too, whom she described as being “lanky and dishevelled with acne”. Many years later she found herself at an event where a movie producer introduced her to the star of his new film, Lawrence of Arabia, “the most beautiful man I’d ever seen”. That dishevelled fellow reporter, Peter O’Toole, had been transformed.
As Taylor Bradford herself would be by her own determination. Having established herself as a journalist, she began to try her hand at fiction: it took her two years to write A Woman of Substance and its original draft ran to over 1,500 pages. It is notable that she is often described as a writer of “romances”: but this is far from accurate, a lazy dismissiveness of the true themes of her work, which are human agency and self-determination.
Although she wrote a great many standalone novels, she is perhaps best known for her familial sequences: The Ravenscar Trilogy (2006-2008); The Cavendon Series (2014-2017); The House of Falconer (2018-2023). They are tales in which families are placed squarely in the financial and power structures of their time; they engage with history and culture; and always, women work to define themselves on their own terms. It is perhaps no wonder that she greatly admired Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter from Grantham whose golden helmet of hair rather closely resembled her own — writing a tribute to her in The Telegraph when she died in 2013.
Jenny Seagrove stars in the TV adaptation of ‘A Woman of Substance’
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Taylor Bradford with her husband Robert in London, during a visit to launch her book ‘Angel’
Bob Dear/PA WireHer own life was blessed with a great romance. She met her husband, Robert Bradford, in 1961 when the pair were set up on a blind date. A film and television producer, he was responsible for bringing much of her work to the screen, most notably A Woman of Substance in 1984. The television mini-series starred Liam Neeson and Jenny Seagrove and received an Emmy nomination. They married in London on Christmas Eve 1963 and shortly thereafter moved to New York. The couple made their home in a grand apartment overlooking the East River where she worked at her desk, on her IBM Lexmark typewriter, from the early hours. She became an American citizen — but was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2007. Bob Bradford died of complications of a stroke in 2019; they had been married for just over 55 years.
“Always present yourself as a woman who expects to succeed,” she wrote in her 2010 novel Playing the Game. She did just that, and proved her maxim throughout her long life.