What on earth must it have been like, in Yorkshire in the 1930s, having both Barbara Taylor, as she then was, and Alan Bennett in the same nursery class?
Whatever they had in the water back there, Barbara Taylor Bradford, like Jackie Collins and Shirley Conran, was one of the great transatlantic towering goddesses of late 20th-century fiction.
Sexy, scrappy, hard-working, hard-driving women writing books about sexy, scrappy, hard-working, hard-driving women, they dominated bestseller lists, the television mini-series, and cemented the idea of a female novelists in most people’s heads: extravagant of hair, unapologetically wealthy, slightly frightening, and completely fabulous.
In fact, Taylor Bradford grew up a product of that postwar consensus – her mother feeding her with libraries and art galleries, self-improvement and a social mobility that is harder to find these days.
After working as a journalist for Woman’s Own and the London Evening News, A Woman of Substance, her first published novel, came out when Taylor Bradford was 46 years old and sold 30m copies. It remains one of the bestselling novels of all time. The original manuscript ran to over 1,500 pages.
In common with almost all women’s fiction, it was, and is, denigrated as mere romance: in fact, it is a full-blooded revenge fantasy, as Emma, our poor, downtrodden Yorkshire girl, becomes a huge success and gets her own back on everyone who ever wronged her. Do not ever underestimate the dreams of the powerless. Taylor Bradford and her contemporaries were selling a different way of living to women who simply did not have those choices.
It is interesting how many of the vast sellers of this period are not fantasies about love and getting married – although they contain these things – but, underlying it all, dreams of work; of success, and financial independence. Once women stopped being quite such a novelty in the workplace, everything would change once again, as Bridget Jones getting her big pants on the telly would attest.
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And all of Taylor Bradford’s dreams came true – publishing is still one of the very few industries where women out-earn men, and she did so with bells on. She was prolific: she published 40 novels, many weighing in around the 800-page mark, and she made an excellent marriage to a man she adored, Robert Bradford, who as a film producer brought many of her books to screen.
Her vast wealth led to the magnificent rumour that she heated her lake in Connecticut to keep her swans warm, and was not quite refuted even more magnificently – “the previous owners didn’t want their swans to freeze to death in the winter, and I don’t see what’s wrong with that”. There was also a rumour that she was the illegitimate descendant of a marquis, which she neither confirmed nor denied, retaining that mixture of glamour and earthiness that were her trademark.
When we shared a publishing house, everyone referred to her by her initials alone – BTB – but always in tones of hushed respect. Her editor absolutely adored her; glamorous, charismatic, and still a Yorkshire girl at heart. Like most ex-journalists, she turned in good copy bang on time throughout her entire long and happy life. She earned it all.
