Novelist Babara Taylor Bradford dead at 91
Yorkshire-born Barbara Taylor Bradford, author of some 40 international bestselling novels, has died, aged 91.
Barbara Taylor Bradford OBE, novelist
Born on May 10, 1933. Died November 24, 2024, aged 91
Barbara Taylor Bradford’s success was a long time coming. She was in her forties and had written four mystery tales, none of which survives. Everything changed when she rethought her approach.
“One day I sat down with a yellow pad and started asking myself questions,” she told The Times in 2019, referring to her reporter’s training. The result was, she said, a “traditional, old-fashioned saga about a woman who makes it in a man’s world”.
She showed the outline of A Woman of Substance to her husband, Robert Bradford, but “he thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew”. Nevertheless, with his encouragement, she sent it to her agent, who read with growing excitement the story of Emma Harte, a Yorkshirewoman from humble beginnings who becomes a business tycoon, navigating the machinations and intrigue of her family retail empire.
A Woman of Substance took two years to write, and the original manuscript weighed 7.5kg and ran to 1,520 pages, all packed with rich descriptions from Taylor Bradford’s native Yorkshire and her knowledge of interior design. It was published in 1979 and remained in The New York Times bestseller list for 43 weeks, before spawning six further novels following the trials and tribulations of Harte and her descendants.
She liked to point out that Harte was the founder of the matriarchal dynastic genre whose message, clear from such titles as Everything to Gain, was consistently encouraging.
In 1984 the original story was made into a six-hour television miniseries, which received two Emmy nominations. It starred Jenny Seagrove, with whom Taylor Bradford formed a close friendship. Joan Collins was another old friend and they would meet up for dinner when in the same city.
At least ten of Taylor Bradford’s novels were dramatised for television, with her husband producing or co-producing most of them. However, she did not enjoy writing the screenplay for Hold the Dream (1986) – one critic said that the characters “go around talking like a typewriter on the desk of a hack author” – and other writers were deputed for the rest.
Taylor Bradford insisted that her characters were not based on real people. However, two books from the 1980s were inspired by real events: Act of Will (1986), by the death of her parents within five weeks of each other in 1981; and Voice of the Heart (1983), by a friend with whom she had fallen out who contacted her after many years to make peace. One reviewer called that novel “great, garish junk”, but was nevertheless enthralled by its “feast of buried secrets, raging ambitions, and international settings; jewels dripping from necks and bodies draped over one another; mansions, movie-making and miscarriage”.
Regardless of the critics, Taylor Bradford – known in the publishing world as BTB – had hit upon a winning formula. She was a storyteller, she insisted, not a literary writer.
“The day I get a good review in The New York Times I’ll kill myself, because it means I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do,” she said.
Working from a 47th-floor apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Taylor Bradford maintained a ferocious regime, writing for 10 hours a day with only Saturday afternoons free, in a den with linen-upholstered walls. She had a happy home life that was enhanced by a succession of bichon frises, with the ashes of one, Gemmy, whom Taylor Bradford had regarded almost as a co-author, being kept in a safe.
Encouraged by her commercially minded husband, Taylor Bradford saw herself as chairwoman of a multimillion-dollar corporation and her books their “product”. Robert would always go the extra mile for his wife, daring her publishers to do likewise and claiming to be the first person to promote a book by taking full back-page adverts in the arts section of The New York Times.
As the books continued to pour out of her pen, so the cash kept rolling in. “I love money,” she confessed. “I love to watch it grow.”
She was well placed to handle such riches, as she told The Yorkshire Post in 1984: “It’s a good thing I’m a down-to-earth girl from Yorkshire with my feet on the ground, otherwise it might have gone to my head.”
Barbara Taylor was born in Upper Armley, Leeds, in 1933, the daughter of Winston Taylor, an engineer who during World War I had served with the Royal Navy, where he had lost a leg, and his wife, Freda (nee Taylor), a nurse who had trained at Ripon Children’s Fever Hospital and became a nanny for a well-to-do family in Armley. An older brother, Vivian, contracted meningitis at 18 months and died before Barbara was born.
Prewar summer holidays were spent at Bridlington or Scarborough, though Barbara also recalled spending nights in an Anderson air-raid shelter, where her mother would read the works of Dickens and the Brontes to her by candlelight. At Christ Church primary school, Armley, she was a contemporary of Alan Bennett, a connection she discovered in 1989 when receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Leeds. Later she went to Northcote School, recalling the green uniform and straw hats. At that time her parents had a dachshund called Snoopy.
In 1943 she organised a jumble sale that raised 2 pounds for Clementine Churchill’s aid to Russia fund and in return received a handwritten note of appreciation from Mrs Churchill that is now held at Churchill College, Cambridge. The bulk of Taylor Bradford’s papers, as well as her original manuscripts, are in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.
She was 10 when her parents bought her a typewriter and two years later her mother sent one of her short stories to a children’s magazine, for which young Barbara received 10 shillings and sixpence.
Increasingly she had a “burning dream” to go to Fleet Street and shared her ambition with Dorothy Simpson, one of her teachers. “Dorothy came one day and said she knew they were looking for girls to join the typing pool at the Yorkshire Evening Post,” she said.
Thus it was that, at 15, she left school and began taking copy dictated by the paper’s reporters, having made a deal with her mother that if it did not work out she would leave and go to university.
Before long she was secretly writing her own reports and slipping them into the sub-editors’ pile, but she was discovered when the accounts department could not work out whom to pay. She was summoned to see Barry Horniblow, the editor, recalling being so nervous that she lost a shoe under his desk. He complimented her work and asked if she wanted to be a journalist. “I don’t want to be, sir,” she replied. “I’m going to be.”
By the age of 16 she was in the reporters’ room, where the largely male journalists resented her presence, although Keith Waterhouse, who was soon to write his own bestseller, Billy Liar, took her under his wing.
“Mother said: ‘Don’t flirt with the men’,” she recalled, adding: “The men didn’t like me because I wouldn’t go home.” Although she kept her head down and worked hard, she would also go with them to the pub on Saturdays, where she was often the only woman. Nevertheless, “no man ever laid a hand on me”, she said.
After a spell editing the paper’s women’s page, she was recruited in 1953 to be fashion editor of Woman’s Own in London, but did not enjoy it. “There were all these chic ladies in hats, while I wanted to be a hard-bitten reporter in a trench coat,” she once said. Instead she found work at the London Evening News, although her father insisted on paying for her to travel around London by cab.
She almost did not meet Robert Bradford, a German-born, Jewish-American film producer.
“I was invited to lunch in London in the autumn of 1961 by mutual friends of ours who were keen for me to meet this movie producer,” she told The Sunday Times in 2016. However, she had a deadline. “I didn’t want to go. I actually said no several times, but finally went in an old jumper with no make-up.”
They met at the home of the screenwriter Jack Davies and fell in love on the spot, marrying on Christmas Eve, 1963. “She calls me Bismarck,” Bradford once said. “Because he was born in Germany,” she would add. In return he called her Napoleon.
Nevertheless, she accepted her mother’s rule that after a row it was up to her to do the backing down. To those who found such advice sexist she would point to the longevity of their marriage, adding: “The proof is in the pudding.”
They were together until Bradford’s death in 2019, aged 92. Taylor Bradford dedicated all her books to him and in 2002 published a handbook called Living Romantically Every Day.
In 1964 the couple moved to New York, where she had hopes of starting a family. Two miscarriages led her to accept that it was not to be. “I still recall that sense of loss, but I realised then that I just couldn’t live my life filled with regrets, dwelling over babies who had never been born,” she said.
Being a woman of leisure did not suit her, so she started writing a regular column on interior design, which lasted for a dozen years and at its height was syndicated to 183 American newspapers. She edited two books of Bible stories for children and, in 1968, wrote a collection of children’s poetry. Those were followed by several books on interior design, including The Complete Encyclopedia of Homemaking Ideas (1968) and a series called “How To Be The Perfect Wife”, including Etiquette to Please Him (1969). Then came A Woman of Substance.
The pace never relented. Among the books published in the 1990s were The Women in His Life (1990), the first of Taylor Bradford’s novels to have a male protagonist, a term she favoured over “hero”, which she deemed too strongly connected with romance novels; Remember (1991), set in the world of television news; and Power of a Woman (1997), about a woman who confronts a past relationship to help her daughter.
She wrote 40 books and sold more than 91 million copies. Her most recent, The Wonder of It All, was part of her House of Falconer series set in Victorian England and was published last year.
Taylor Bradford, who never shed her Yorkshire accent or her British passport (though she did take American citizenship because of “tax problems"), was generous in her support of charitable organisations, including the Barbara Bush Foundation for family literacy, and was a member of the St George’s Society of New York. However, her only hobby was reading. She particularly enjoyed Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs (2016) and Andrew Roberts’s Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018).
Politically she was a fan of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, although her childhood churchgoing had tapered away. “I’ve kept my faith but I’m not religious,” she said in an interview with The Times for her obituary.
Despite advancing years and a hip replacement in August 2019, Taylor Bradford remained active and energetic. Her London base was the Dorchester Hotel, where she would hold court in the Promenade tearoom.
Despite her strong female protagonists, Taylor Bradford insisted that she had no time for feminism and would bristle at the mention of the word. “Feminism implies bra-burning, standing on soap-boxes and man-hating,” she said. “Of course I believe in equality in everything for women, but I think we’re all authors of our own fate. I never set out to spread any message with my books. I simply want to tell stories of strong female survivors.”
Poorer nations poised to drive global economic growth
The global economy is on track to double in size in nominal terms over the next 15 years, with growth fuelled by poorer nations catching up with richer ones, according to forecasters.
Can a bank make carbon offsetting a growth industry?
Many firms have supported tree-planting projects as a way of burnishing green credentials, usually through third-party scheme developers. The UK’s Atom Bank is taking a direct approach.