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Barbara Taylor Bradford was a giant of post-war British literature. Her 40 novels have sold more than 91 million copies, and she transformed the fiction landscape by writing books about women who, like their author, set goals that they met and exceeded. His first novel, A woman of substancewas published in 1979, when she was 46: like Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx, Penelope Fitzgerald and many other prominent women writers, success came after 40 years.
The first volume of what became the Emma Harte saga was the story of a poor servant who becomes the founder of one of the most successful department store chains in the world. At the height of her career, Taylor Bradford’s heroine remembers the advice she was given: “We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift blame and no one else accepts accolades. » A woman of substance spent 43 weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists: its author accepted the accolades. His latest book, The wonder of it allwas published last year.
She was born in Upper Armley, Leeds, in 1933, to Winston and Freda Taylor. His father, an engineer, had lost a leg during the First World War; her mother worked as a childminder and nanny. Before Barbara was born, her parents lost a baby 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 Freda to whom she credited her love of literature and her determination. She could read before the age of four and was “force-fed” by Dickens. It was first published at the age of 10, when her mother sent a story she had written to a children’s magazine. She was paid seven shillings and sixpence, and her career had begun.
Her parents wanted her to go to university: at 16 she got a job as a typist at the Yorkshire Evening Post. She began sneaking stories from sub-editors’ desks – soon she became a reporter, the only woman in the newsroom. She worked alongside Keith Waterhouse, author of Billy the Liar and the scenario of Whistle in the windwho took her under his wing; she also met another journalist there, whom she described as being “lanky and disheveled with acne.” Several 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 have ever seen”. That disheveled fellow journalist, Peter O’Toole, had been transformed.
As Taylor Bradford herself would be through 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 version was over 1,500 pages long. It is worth noting that she is often described as a writer of “romances”: but this is far from accurate, a lazy disdain for the real themes of her work, which are human action and self-determination.
Although she has written many standalone novels, she is perhaps best known for her family sequences: The Ravenscar Trilogy (2006-2008); The Cavendon series (2014-2017); The Falconer’s House (2018-2023). These are narratives in which families are directly placed within the financial and power structures of their time; they engage with history and culture; and still, women strive to define themselves on their own terms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she greatly admired Margaret Thatcher, the Grantham grocer’s daughter whose golden hairstyle was quite similar to her own – writing a tribute to her in The Telegraph when she died in 2013.
His own life was marked by great romance. She met her husband, Robert Bradford, in 1961 on a blind date. A film and television producer, he is responsible for bringing a large part of his work to the screen, notably A woman of substance in 1984. The television miniseries starred Liam Neeson and Jenny Seagrove and received an Emmy nomination. They were married in London on Christmas Eve 1963 and moved to New York soon after. The couple took up residence in a large apartment overlooking the East River, where she worked at her desk, on her IBM Lexmark typewriter, from early in the morning. She became a US citizen – but received an OBE for services to literature in 2007. Bob Bradford died of complications from a stroke in 2019; they had been married for just over 55 years.
“Always present yourself as a woman who hopes to succeed,” she wrote in her 2010 novel. Play the game. She did just that and proved her maxim throughout her long life.
