Novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford dies aged 91

Barbara Taylor Bradford, the bestselling writer of novels together with A Girl of Substance, has died aged 91, her writer has confirmed.

The novelist died peacefully at her house on Sunday after a brief sickness, “surrounded by family members to the very finish”.

Described as “the grande dame of blockbusters”, Taylor Bradford printed her fortieth novel in 2023, the third in her Victorian household saga Home of Falconer sequence. Cumulative gross sales of her books throughout her lifetime reached greater than 91m copies, and have been printed in additional than 40 languages and in 90 international locations.

Lynne Drew, Barbara’s long-term writer and editor at HarperCollins, mentioned working with the author “was an enormous privilege but additionally an enormous quantity of enjoyable. Perennially curious, enthusiastic about everybody and terribly pushed, she beloved writing, and the conversations we had about her characters have been unfailingly the perfect hours of my week.

“She was an inspiration for thousands and thousands of readers and numerous writers. I’m so proud to have been her writer for over 20 years – working together with her has been one of many nice thrills of my profession, and I and everybody at HarperCollins will miss her enormously.”

Born in Leeds in Might 1933, Taylor Bradford attended the identical nursery college as Alan Bennett. Her dad and mom had a son who died of meningitis earlier than she was born, which led to her mom placing “all her pissed off love into me”, Taylor Bradford informed the Guardian in 2013. Her mom gave her a cultural schooling, she mentioned, taking her to the cinema each week and to the Russian ballet at any time when it got here to Leeds. The author fictionalised her dad and mom’ marriage in her 1986 novel An Act of Will.

Taylor Bradford started her profession as a typist for the Yorkshire Night Publish, and was later promoted to reporter. She went on to turn into the paper’s first girls’s editor, earlier than transferring to London on the age of 20, the place she labored for Girl’s Personal and the London Night Information. An inside design column she wrote was syndicated to 183 newspapers.

She met her husband, the American movie producer Robert Bradford, generally known as Bob, when she was 28, at a cocktail occasion, they usually have been married on Christmas Eve 1963, after which she moved to the US to be with him. It was at that time that she determined to strive writing fiction, beginning, and abandoning, 4 suspense novels. Then, in her late 30s, she “interviewed herself”, she informed the Observer in 2006. “I believed: what if I get to 55, and I’ve by no means written a novel? I’m going to hate myself. I’m going to be a kind of bitter, unfulfilled writers.”

After that, she began writing the sagas she would turn into recognized for; her debut novel, A Girl of Substance, was printed in 1979 and has since bought greater than 30m copies globally. Six sequels within the Emma Harte saga adopted, and a long-awaited prequel, A Man of Honour, was printed in 2021. Ten of the writer’s books have been tailored for display by her husband, starring actors together with Liam Neeson, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Elizabeth Hurley.

The actor Jenny Seagrove, who starred as Emma Harte within the TV adaptation of A Girl of Substance, mentioned when she met Taylor Bradford in 1984 she was very nervous. “The door opens and all I can say is {that a} powerhouse of glamour and heat heads in the direction of me, grabs me, hugs me, and says … ‘You might be my Emma Harte’. And that was the beginning of an extended friendship with the power of nature that I’m proud to name my buddy.”

“We noticed one another at any time when she and her beloved Bob have been in London,” Seagrove added. “We shared canine tales and talked about every little thing below the solar. She by no means modified. Success by no means diluted her heat and humour or her capability to narrate to everybody she met, whether or not a cleaner or a princess. She by no means, ever forgot that she was only a lady from Yorkshire that labored laborious and made good.”

Taylor Bradford and her husband didn’t have kids, which she mentioned was by no means an awesome supply of unhappiness to her. Bob died following a stroke in 2019, which the writer described as being “devastating”.

The pair have been collectively for 58 years and married for 56. “His final phrases have been: ‘I like you.’ I’m so glad I informed him: ‘I like you too, darling.’ Every week later he was gone,” she mentioned in 2021.

Lots of Taylor Bradford’s novels observe younger girls from humble backgrounds who succeed by means of years of laborious work. The writer was usually quoted as having mentioned: “I write about largely strange girls who go on to attain the extraordinary.”

In a foreword to the fortieth anniversary version of A Girl of Substance, the tv presenter and writer Fern Britton wrote that in “power of nature” protagonist Emma Harte, Taylor Bradford had “created a heroine who has impressed girls for the previous 4 many years – impressed them to be brave, break guidelines and observe their goals”.

When requested how she want to be remembered in a 2014 interview, Taylor Bradford responded: “If in any respect, as a compassionate lady.”