Barbara Taylor Bradford, OBE (10 May 1933 – 24 November 2024) was a British-American best-selling novelist. Her debut novel, A Woman of Substance, was published in 1979 and sold over 30 million copies worldwide.[1] She wrote 40 novels, all bestsellers in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Barbara Taylor was born on 10 May 1933 in Armley, Leeds, to Freda and Winston Taylor.[2][3] Her father was an engineer who had lost a leg while serving in the First World War.[4] She attended Christ Church Upper Armley CofE Primary School in the Leeds suburb of Upper Armley alongside the writer Alan Bennett.[4] As a child during the Second World War, she held a jumble sale at her school and donated the £2 proceeds to the "Aid to Russia" fund. She later received a handwritten thank-you letter from Clementine Churchill, the wife of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.[5]
Her older brother Vivian died of meningitis before she was born. She later described her mother as having "put all her frustrated love into me".[6] Her parents' marriage is fictionalized in her 1986 novel An Act of Will.[4]
In her youth, Barbara Taylor read Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, and Colette.[7] At the age of ten she decided to be a writer after sending a story to a magazine. She was paid 7s 6d for the story, with which she bought handkerchiefs and a green vase for her parents.[4]
Her biographer, Piers Dudgeon, later uncovered evidence that her mother Freda Walker was the illegitimate daughter of Oliver Robinson, 2nd Marquess of Ripon, a local Yorkshire landowner who employed the author's grandmother, Edith Walker, as a servant. Dudgeon informed Taylor Bradford that her grandmother and Ripon had had three children together. After some hesitation, Taylor Bradford allowed Dudgeon to publish this information in his biography.[4] Although initially angry at Dudgeon's discovery, she later said that "I came round. There's no stigma now."[4] Her grandmother later spent time in workhouses,[4] which Taylor Bradford explored in the ITV television series Secrets of the Workhouse (2013).[8]
Taylor met her husband, American film producer Robert E. Bradford, on a blind date in 1961 after being introduced by the English screenwriter Jack Davies.[4][9] They married in 1963 and moved permanently to the United States.[3]
Her first fiction writing efforts were four suspense novels, a genre she later abandoned.[4] Bradford would subsequently describe "interviewing herself", saying that "I was in my late thirties. I thought: what if I get to 55, and I've never written a novel? I'm going to hate myself. I'm going to be one of those bitter, unfulfilled writers."[4] Her debut novel, A Woman of Substance, became an enduring best-seller and, according to Reuters, ranks as one of the top-ten best-selling novels of all time.[10] It was followed by 39 other novels, all bestsellers in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Bradford considered Irish historian and author Cornelius Ryan her literary mentor. Ryan encouraged her writing and was the first person (other than her mother) to whom she had confided her literary ambitions.[11] Her favourite contemporary authors were P. D. James, Bernard Cornwell, and Ruth Rendell.[5]
Bradford wrote 40 novels; the last one, The Wonder Of It All, was published in 2023.[12]
In a 1979 interview with the New York Times, Bradford reflected on her career and anticipated legacy: "I’m not going to go down in history as a great literary figure. I’m a commercial writer — a storyteller. I suppose I will always write about strong women. I don’t mean hard women, though. I mean women of substance."[13]
A common pattern in her novels was a young woman of humble background rising in business through years of hard work, often involving enormous self-sacrifice. She was quoted as saying: "I write about mostly ordinary women who go on to achieve the extraordinary."[14]
Ten of Bradford's books were made into television mini-series and television movies,[15] produced by her husband Robert E. Bradford.[16] Some of which include:
Bradford's wealth was estimated at between £60–166 million. There were rumours that she owned 2,000 pairs of shoes and that her former Connecticut home's lake was heated for the benefit of her swans.[4][19][20] She addressed the rumours in a 2011 interview, tracing the shoes rumour to a joke and the heated lake to the previous owners of the house who had installed it on part of the lake to provide an ice-free area for a pair of swans in winter.[21]
Robert Bradford died in 2019.[23][6] Barbara Taylor Bradford lived in Manhattan, New York City, and became an American citizen in 1992.[17][4] On 24 November 2024, she died at home from cancer at the age of 91.[24][25]
^Barbara Taylor Bradford, This Is Your Life, Michael Aspel, Barbara Taylor Bradford, James Brolin, 3 January 1990, retrieved 26 November 2024{{citation}}: CS1 maint: others (link)