Novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford dies at 91

Article content

Barbara Taylor Bradford, a British American novelist who debuted in 1979 with “A Woman of Substance,” a rags-to-riches tale that she followed with more than 30 bestsellers, mostly about women who were strong, ambitious and resilient – and fabulously rich and beautiful – died Nov. 24 at her home in New York City. She was 91.

Article content

Article content

Article content

The cause of her death was cancer, said her public relations representative, Maria Boyle.

Mrs. Bradford’s novels have sold more than 90 million copies, and 10 of them were made into TV miniseries and films. With the sale of screen rights and her colossal advances, she amassed a personal fortune, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that was said to have rivaled that of Queen Elizabeth II.

Her books centred on women who knew what they wanted in life – not unlike Mrs. Bradford. She was brought up in the northern county of Yorkshire, was driven by her mother to rise above her middle-class station in postwar Britain, and worked her way from provincial newspaper secretary-typist to London fashion editor to New York interior-design maven before embarking on a fiction career.

Article content

“My mother was a striver. I’m a striver. I write about people who strive,” she told the Boston Globe. “To be content with one’s lot, especially if it is a lowly lot, is rather lazy.”

Mrs. Bradford, who insisted she didn’t traffic in romances, specialized in family sagas in which multiple generations were occupied with sprawling business empires, tangled love affairs and heart-wrenching betrayals.

Her fans could not get enough of her “women warriors,” as she called her leading ladies, or her skill at creating suspense. She was critic-proof, having worked meticulously on a formula and a style accessible to the masses of women who saw themselves in the heroines whose lavish lives filled her pages.

“The reading public of America is made up largely of women, and they want to read about women who have made a success of their lives,” she told the New York Times. “It’s a matter of identification. Most novels concerning money and power are about men.”

Article content

Article content

Mrs. Bradford, who early in her career wrote books and a syndicated column about interior design and domestic etiquette, tried composing suspense novels before experiencing what she described as an epiphany: that she should craft a story about a woman like herself. She completed “A Woman of Substance” in two years – the longest time she devoted to any of her books – and it was published by Doubleday when she was 46.

Set in early 20th-century Yorkshire, the novel follows Emma Harte, a maid-turned-retail magnate, as she builds her empire and seeks revenge on the family of a man who left her pregnant during her servant days.

Mrs. Bradford followed the volume, an immediate commercial success, with another aristocratic family drama, “Voice of the Heart” (1983), and then “Hold the Dream” (1985), the much-anticipated sequel to her first novel in which Harte’s fortune is passed on to her granddaughter. (The Emma Harte series comprises eight books written over decades.)

Article content

For Mrs. Bradford, life imitated art. Like her heroines, she conveyed the radiant look of a Hollywood star, with her signature pearls, blue-green eyes and coifed blond hair. She drew on her early romantic life and her 55 years of marriage, to film and television producer Robert Bradford, for plot points about lust and everlasting love. She was a habitué of elite social circles on both sides of the Atlantic. And she surrounded herself with Chanel clothes, Hermès handbags and Cartier jewelry – although she rarely shopped for herself.

“I find trailing around the shops very boring,” she told the London Independent. “I always feel I could do something better with my time, like write a book.”

Mrs. Bradford spent 12 hours a day at her electric typewriter (or writing in longhand), wearing a T-shirt, an old pair of pants and no makeup, her two Bichon Frisé pups at her feet. She said her focus was absolute until nightfall, when she emerged to greet her husband in their sprawling Manhattan apartment adorned with impressionist art, silk-upholstered walls, crystal chandeliers and Louis XVI armchairs. She wore her wealth proudly, but only, she maintained, because she had earned it.

Article content

“I work hard for it,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2011. “I would say to anyone who wants to criticize me: fine, but you get up at five o’clock every morning and sit at a desk all day and throw your guts into a book and wait to see who’s going to take potshots at you and then go out on the road to promote it.

“I think I’ve earned it, frankly,” she added. “I haven’t stolen it from anybody.”

From typist to fame and fortune

Barbara Taylor was born in Leeds on May 10, 1933, and grew up in the suburb of Upper Armley. Her mother was a nanny and nurse, and her father was an engineer who had lost a leg in the First World War. She was the couple’s only child to grow into adulthood, after an older brother died of meningitis when he was a toddler.

Her mother devoted herself entirely to Barbara, even refusing to share a bed with her husband for fear she might become pregnant and have to divide her affections with another child. (Mrs. Bradford’s 1986 book “Act of Will” is based on her parents’ passionate and volatile marriage.)

Article content

Her mother cultivated fine tastes in her daughter, taking her to see Russian ballet, dressing her in gloves, playing Puccini on the record player and visiting Yorkshire’s stately homes. The experiences fueled her imagination, and she won a magazine contest with a story about a girl and her pony. The win made writing “a compulsion,” she later said.

At 16, over the objections of her mother, she quit private school and joined the typist pool at the Yorkshire Evening Post.

“On weekends,” she recounted in a dramatic monologue to the Globe, “I started doing little stories on my own. I wrote a piece about a woman in town, a little old lady the children called The Witch. She lived in great poverty in a hovel with her animals. I discovered that her brother was the richest man in town. Why wasn’t he helping her? Why? The real story was that she chose to live that way. She was an independent woman with no means at all. That’s strength, isn’t it?

Article content

“Well, I dropped that story on the editor’s desk and slunk out of his office.

“A few days later, the head of the typing pool said: ‘Miss Taylor, what have you done?’ ‘Nothing!’ was my immediate defensive reply. ‘The editor wants to see you,’ she said in a warning voice.

“Obviously, he wanted to speak to me about my story, which I mentioned casually to her. I added: ‘I want to be a reporter!’ And she, who ruled the typist pool like the stern headmistress of a private English girls school, replied austerely: ‘They all do! None of them ever make it.’

“When I went to see the editor, he said: ‘Soooo . . . you want to be a reporter?’ ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I’m going to be a reporter.’

“He was used to fierce old female dragons as reporters, and I was a 16-year-old with long blond hair and chutzpah. Maybe fools rush in where angels fear to tread. But, I am a strong fool. Eventually, he put me with the reporters.”

Article content

Her resourcefulness brought her the nickname “Scoops Taylor.” In 1953, at age 20, she hopscotched from women’s page editor in Yorkshire to fashion editor for Woman’s Own magazine in London. She also was a columnist for the London Evening News and held a flurry of editing positions as she carved a reputation as an ambitious workaholic.

She met Bradford in 1961 on a blind date and described him as “movie-star gorgeous” and someone in whom she saw a like-minded soul with a ferocious compulsion to compete. Born into a Jewish family, he had escaped Nazi Germany, settled in the United States and established himself as an executive with TV and film production companies behind such movies as the Charlton Heston epic “El Cid” (1961).

Article content

They soon settled in New York, where he continued in the screen trade and she began her syndicated column on interior design.

In interviews, Mrs. Bradford professed her own, at times contradictory, brand of feminism. She encouraged women to follow their dreams at all costs but to pick up their husband’s socks for the sake of the marriage. A Republican, she complained that the #MeToo movement had gone too far and rejected “militant feminists,” yet she was a proponent of equal rights between the sexes, especially pay equity. She wrote about women who ran vast business empires but once told a reporter that a woman “must always know when to keep her mouth shut.”

Mrs. Bradford spoke of her own life much as she described those of her characters, letting followers vicariously revel in the glitz and glamour while also revealing her inner desires, needs and struggles. She spoke about sleeping with boyfriends before marriage, her regular Botox treatments in later life, and the two miscarriages she suffered during her marriage.

Article content

Robert Bradford died in 2019. The couple had no children, and she had no immediate survivors.

As Mrs. Bradford veered in her writing between period pieces and modern-set dramas, her storylines encompassed breast cancer, child abuse, bisexuality, pilfered art and combat reporting. The reliable through-line was a vibrant female protagonist, forged through great love, a consequential discovery, adventure in exotic locales – and a taste for Givenchy.

“Writing is my identity,” she told the Daily Mail. “It’s who I am. I’ve got lots of ideas in my head and, if I didn’t get all that stuff out onto the page, I’d probably be taken away.”

Article content