Barbara
Taylor Bradford obituary: The woman of substance who decided to become a writer aged 10

A Woman Of Substance, the story of a woman who launches her own retail empire after starting out as a maid, was part of her Emma Harte Saga, which spawned eight books, concluding with 2021’s A Man Of Honour.

The series was adapted for a three-part TV mini-series for Channel 4 in 1985, starring Liam Neeson with Jenny Seagrove as Emma Harte, and received two Emmy nominations.

A Man Of Honour was a prequel to her debut, which starts five years before the original and follows the fortunes of Blackie O’Neill, who leaves Co Kerry for Leeds to build a better life, and meets kitchen maid Emma.

Other series include The Ravenscar Trilogy (2006 to 2008), The Cavendon Chronicles (2014 to 2017) and The House Of Falconer (2018 to 2023), and standalone novels such as Love In Another Town (1995).

As many as 10 of her novels were adapted for TV, some produced by her husband, Robert E Bradford.

Barbara Taylor Bradford was born in Armley, Leeds in 1933, to Freda and Winston Taylor. Her father was an engineer who had lost a leg in the First World War.

As a child during the Second World war she held a jumble sale at her nursery school, where a fellow pupil was author Alan Bennett, and donated the £2 proceeds to the Aid to Russia fund. She received a letter from Clementine Churchill, the wife of then-prime minister Winston Churchill.

Barbara’s older brother, Vivian, died of meningitis before she was born, and she described her mother as having “put all her frustrated love into me”.

She had dedicated at age 10 that she would become a writer. Weaned on Dickens, the Brontë sisters and Thomas Hardy, she wrote a story of her own and sent it to a magazine. It paid her 7s 6d, with which she bought handkerchiefs and a green vase for her parents.

Her biographer, Piers Dudgeon, suggested that her mother was in fact the illegitimate daughter of the wealthy landowner the Marquess of Ripon, who employed Freda’s mother, Edith Walker, as a servant. Barbara would say she had come to terms with the revelation and went on to fictionalise her parents’ marriage in the 1986 book, An Act Of Will.

Her professional career began at age 15 as a typist, and later a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post.

She moved to London, where she eventually became the fashion editor of Woman’s Own magazine and a columnist for the London Evening News.

While working at the paper she met a fellow journalist whom she described as “lanky and dishevelled with acne” and said he kept trying to talk to her even after she turned him down for a date at the cinema – it was the future actor Peter O’Toole.

She said in 2021: “Years later, [her colleague, the Leeds-born author and playwright] Keith Waterhouse and I were at an event where the producer Sam Spiegel introduced the star of his new movie.

“Out walked the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, dressed as Lawrence of Arabia. Keith said ‘Don’t you wish you’d gone to the pictures with him now?’. I never got over Peter’s transformation.”

She went on to write an interior decoration column syndicated to 183 newspapers, and returned to the subject later in her career for a number of non-fiction books. These included Bradford’s Living Romantically Every Day, Etiquette To Please Him and A Garland Of Children’s Verse.

In 1961 she met her husband-to-be, a film and television producer, on a blind date and they were married in London on Christmas Eve 1963. The following year they moved to New York and remained together for 55 years until he died, after a stroke, in July 2019. They had no children.

After starting and ditching several attempts at a novel, she hit the big time at the age of 46 when A Woman Of Substance was published, making her an overnight success.

In 2021 she denied rumours that she heated a lake at her former Connecticut home in order to keep the swans warm. “I didn’t. The previous owners did it to stop the swans freezing to death in winter: a good reason,” she said.

Ms Taylor Bradford was made an OBE as part of the Queen’s 2007 birthday honours, for her services to literature, and has received honorary doctorates from Leeds University, the University of Bradford, Mount St Mary’s College, Sienna College and Post University.

Her original manuscripts are archived in Leeds University’s Brotherton Library, beside those of the Bronte sisters, whose books Taylor Bradford read as a child.

In 2017 she was recognised as one of 90 Great Britons to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday.

Taylor Bradford also published three Christian books – Children’s Stories Of Jesus From The New Testament, Children’s Stories Of The Bible From The Old Testament, and Children’s Stories Of The Bible From The Old And New Testaments.

In 2014, the writer became an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust, an independent UK charity that aims to transform lives through literacy.