Barbara Taylor Bradford embodied the intrepid, rags-to-riches heroines of her bestselling novels

The Leeds-born writer was as famous for her lavish lifestyle as she was for her formidable work ethic. After her death at age 91, Claire Allfree remembers a woman and author who flouted convention and evaded categories

The day I get a good review in The New York Times I’ll kill myself,” once said the novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford who, following a short illness, has died at the age of 91. “They only give good reviews to books that don’t sell.” Taylor Bradford, known affectionately across the industry as BTB, certainly never had to worry about her books not selling. Her career can be summed up in astronomical numbers – 40 books published; 91 million books sold and the rights to 90 countries. Her 1979 debut A Woman of Substance is one of the top-selling novels ever published. At one point she was Britain’s second wealthiest woman after the late Queen.

BTB is the last of the great dowager British female authors – a select group that also included Barbara Cartland and Jackie Collins (and might have also numbered Catherine Cookson, had Cookson not led such a humble life first in Hastings and then in the North East). Each was as notorious for their stately, idiosyncratic, sometimes transatlantic lifestyle as for the cheerfully formulaic bestselling blockbusters they churned out with cuckoo clock regularity – and which won them the devoted affection of a large and overwhelmingly female fan base.

In the case of BTB, her novels invariably told the story of an indomitable, spirited young girl from an impoverished background who fought hardship to make a success of her life while having plenty of “nice sex” along the way; BTB would sniff at anything remotely vulgar. As a writer she had an undeniable common touch, combining relatable protagonists with sweeping, frequently historical settings – even if her prose favoured overheated metaphor over nuance and lacked a certain narrative elan. Her novels were “racy”, dryly commented the journalist Andrew Billen once, “but they didn’t race”.

Yet BTB was more than a collection of stats and figures and stock heroines with creamy English rose complexions, personified most potently in A Woman of Substance’s Emma Harte, the domestic servant-turned-business mogul whose rags-to-riches trajectory eventually spawned seven novels. BTB was also a carefully cultivated, highly appealing brand. Readers loved her because she epitomised the feminist lite mix of aspirational lifestyle and tough, independent spirit that typified many of her plucky heroines (BTB heroines were nothing if not plucky).

Following her 1963 marriage to Bob Bradford, a New York producer whom she met when she was 28 (and whose canny commercial instinct helped mastermind her literary identity), she moved to America and, following the success of A Woman of Substance, which was made into a Channel 4 series in 1985 starring Deborah Kerr and Liam Neeson, embarked on a life that combined a formidable work ethic (she would rise at 6.30am each day to write) with old-world luxury.

BTB lived in a heavily perfumed whirl of Chanel blouses and Gauthier jewellery, in Connecticut houses and New York apartments stuffed with chintz and marble fireplaces, which she shared with her beloved bichon frise dogs – one was called Chammie, short for Champagne. When BTB came to London she would stay in The Dorchester. She was never photographed without makeup or an impeccable blow-dry. “I don’t like to tell women what to do but I think it’s a good idea to try to look nice,” she had said. All of this she did with an endearing side helping of cheery Northern salt. “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,” she once told the Yorkshire Evening Post.

BTB’s particular blend of feminism was both inspirational and old fashioned (PA)

BTB’s particular blend of feminism was both inspirational and old fashioned, born out of a life defined by fierce personal drive and an innate conservatism (she was a fan of Margaret Thatcher and in the US, where she had lived since the Sixties, voted Republican). Such views were expressed through her fictional female protagonists who broke the rules yet remained inherently traditional. BTB herself was born to a lower-middle-class family in Leeds in 1933. Her engineer father was “tall, dark and handsome”, like all the men in her novels (she once famously said she would never base a character on Harvey Weinstein because he was “too ugly”). He was also a bit of a womaniser.

It was her mother, who was later discovered to be the illegitimate daughter of the Marquess of Ripon, following an affair between him and her domestic servant grandmother, who encouraged the young Barbara to read prodigiously and who installed in her an unassailable self-belief. “There was no way I was going to end up slaving in some textile factory, married off and perpetually pregnant, like so many Yorkshire girls of my generation,” BTB said of her decision to take a job as a typist at the Yorkshire Evening Post when she was 15.

Of course, I believe in equality in everything for women, but I think we’re all authors of our own fate

There she was mentored by journalist and novelist Keith Waterhouse, who warned her against the lecherous young men in the newsroom, one of whom included a pre-Lawrence of Arabia Peter O’Toole, who apparently “had a real thing” for BTB. “He was lanky and dishevelled with acne,” she later recalled. “I refused to go to the movies with him, but he still edged up to me whenever the newsroom went to the pub.” By this point, BTB had already had her first story published in a magazine (at the age of 10). By the age of 18 she was editing the women’s pages. And by 20 she had a column in the Evening Standard.

Despite her success in a male-dominated field such as journalism, she was also an incorrigible believer in conventional gender roles. During the 1960s she wrote a series of books called How to be the Perfect Wife. (During this period, she also suffered a number of miscarriages and remained childless in her otherwise, by all accounts, ecstatic marriage to Bob, who died in 2019.)

Taylor Bradford with her husband Robert at Claridges Hotel, London (Bob Dear/PA)

Her books tended to betray the extent to which she adored men as much as she did “strong women”. Her specific idea of feminism certainly had no truck with the militant ideology of the 1970s. “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.”

That “stand on your own two feet”-style gumption is partly why, I think, so many people loved BTB’s novels. Her female characters in particular defy the odds and achieve their dreams, yet they also refuse to see themselves as victims of anything and, crucially, they also never preach. “I never set out to spread any message with my books,” BTB once said. “I simply want to tell stories of strong female survivors.” She always knew her own worth, and promoted it ruthlessly and unquestionably, awe-inspiringly successfully. If any woman was ever the author of their own fate, it was the indefatigable BTB.