It was Graham Greene who inadvertently launched Barbara Taylor Bradford, who has died aged 91, on the road that would lead, in 2003, to her induction into the Writers Hall of Fame of America, alongside Mark Twain, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. Character is plot, he had explained in an article – and suddenly Bradford understood what fiction was really about.
It was the mid-1970s, and BTB, as she came to be known, was already a successful journalist, with more than a dozen columns syndicated throughout the US. But as an author she had succeeded only with books on decorating and design, having abandoned several attempts at a novel. “If I hated them, then the reader would hate them,” she acknowledged.
Greene’s comment proved to be a revelation. “Suddenly, I understood what writing fiction was: it’s who you are, what your protagonist is. If it’s a wimpy sort of person they’re not going to get anywhere. But if it’s a driven, ambitious, go-ahead woman who’s not going to be deterred by anybody then, obviously, she’s going to be a combination of all those strong women I admire, such as Marie Curie, Catherine the Great and Elizabeth Tudor.”
That, if you will, was the substance of the woman, and so was born Emma Harte, the heroine of Bradford’s debut novel, A Woman of Substance, published in 1979. Sold for $25,000 on the basis of just a few pages, it was an overnight success and went on to sell 32m copies, remaining on the New York Times bestseller lists for 43 weeks. The pregnant 16-year-old kitchen maid who is forced to leave her job and make her own way in the world is, by the novel’s conclusion, a rich matriarch presiding over the outposts of her worldwide empire from the comfort of a private jet. The TV miniseries that followed in 1985, starring Jenny Seagrove and Liam Neeson, was a global success with a UK audience of nearly 14 million.
Almost immediately after the book’s publication, Bradford began receiving fan mail, asking what happens to Emma next. Over the years, seven further novels chronicled the vicissitudes of the Harte dynasty: Hold the Dream (1985), To Be the Best (1988), Emma’s Secret (2004) – which brought Harte back to life via a cache of previously unseen diaries chronicling the missing years during the London blitz – and three further titles before a prequel, A Man of Honour, was published in 2021.
Bradford was born and brought up in Yorkshire and remained proud of her roots. Her accent may have occupied some hitherto unexplored waters of the Atlantic, and her appearance – power suits and jewellery, face tanned beneath a helmet of blonde hair – owed more to her adopted New York than her native Leeds, but there was always something quintessentially British about her, even as she pressed the buzzer to summon afternoon tea when I interviewed her in her Upper East Side penthouse in 1995.
She admired Margaret Thatcher, “who was very resolute and always knew her own mind”, and in more recent years expressed her despair at Tory leaders “tearing the country apart”. She regretted that the US’s “ugly and confrontational politics” had spread across the Atlantic. “There are no statesmen of the calibre of Churchill, who gave the British people hope, dignity and courage,” she observed.
The only child of Freda and Winston Taylor, Barbara was born in Armley, Leeds. Her father was an engineer who had lost a leg in the first world war. Her mother had spent some of her childhood in the Ripon workhouse but, like the strong women who would people her daughter’s fiction, she made something of herself, becoming a children’s nurse and nanny.
A voracious reader, Freda encouraged the habit in her daughter who, by the time she reached her teens, had read all of Dickens and the Brontës, “though I didn’t always understand all of it”.
At seven, Barbara was scribbling her first stories and, at 12, sold her first short story. “I was paid 10 shillings and sixpence – a lot of money for a little girl in those days. I bought my mother a nice green vase and some handkerchiefs from the local haberdashery for my father,” she recalled, in the sort of detail that characterised her novels.
Her parents were disappointed that young Barbara eschewed higher education in favour of “the best university in the world – a newspaper office”. She started at the Yorkshire Evening Post shortly before her 16th birthday; Peter O’Toole was a fellow journalist there. Hired as a typist, she was soon promoted to cub reporter and, much to her mother’s dismay, sported a tatty trenchcoat that she felt was essential to the role.
She confided to the editor her ambitions to be a novelist. “Everybody’s got a story, Barbara,” he counselled. “Just go out one day and tap someone on the arm and ask them to tell you their life story – you’ll have a novel right there.”
But she put the ambition on the back burner, enjoying life as a journalist and the varied opportunities it afforded her. It was Keith Waterhouse, whose desk faced hers, who taught her “the who, what, where, when, how rule that I still use for my novels”.
At 18, she was the women’s editor and, at 20, she moved to London to be fashion editor on Woman’s Own and then a columnist on the Evening News.
On a blind date in London, organised by mutual friends, she met the man who became her husband and her business partner; a Berlin-born, Swiss-educated American and a film producer, Robert Bradford cut a glamorous figure. “If it wasn’t quite love at first sight, it was a strong attraction,” she remembered, 40 years into their life together.
They married in 1963, and the following year – as the Beatles touched down at JFK, making Britain instantly fashionable in the US – headed for New York, to pursue their independent careers. Beside her journalism, in the 60s and 70s Bradford wrote several volumes of nonfiction (including Etiquette to Please Him, in the series How to Be a Perfect Wife, 1969), collections of Bible stories for children, and a number of interior design titles.
In the 80s, with Barbara Taylor Bradford an international success story, Robert took over the management of his wife’s career and produced the TV series and films based on her many books. “I refer to him as the General and he calls me Napoleon,” she quipped, adding that the secret of their success – besides loving each other and having mutual interests – was separate offices and separate televisions. She described him as her “most treasured possession”.
When, after two years’ writing, Bradford delivered A Woman of Substance to her US publisher, its manuscript stood “as tall as a small child”. There have since been some 40 other titles, including the books of the Emma Harte Saga and the quartet of Cavendon Chronicles, with sales totalling 90m copies in 40 languages in 90 countries. Ten books have been made into feature films or TV mini-series. Her last novel, The Wonder of It All, was published in 2023.
Arguably, A Woman of Substance launched a new genre, the saga as blockbuster. Now its pages reside, with all Bradford’s other manuscripts, in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, filed between those other great Yorkshire literary exports, Alan Bennett (with whom she was at nursery school) and the Brontë sisters.
She was appointed OBE in 2007 and named as one of 90 Great Britons (alongside Ray Davies, Barbara Windsor and Mary Berry) in a portrait to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday in 2016.
“I’m a writer, that’s my identity,” she once said, expressing an ambition to “die at my desk”. “I have a puritan work ethic – I think God will strike me down if I’m not busy”. Besides, she added, “novelists make order out of chaos”.
She was predeceased by Robert, who died in 2019.