Barbara Taylor Bradford, ‘A Woman of Substance’ Novelist, Dies at 91

Her own rags-to-riches story mirrored those of many of her resilient heroines, and her dozens of novels helped her amass a fortune of $300 million.

Barbara Taylor Bradford, one of the world’s best-selling novelists, who captivated readers for decades with chronicles of buried secrets, raging ambitions and strong women of humble origins rising to wealth and power, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 91.

She died after a short illness, her publisher, HarperCollins, said on Monday.

Beginning with the runaway success of her 1979 debut novel, “A Woman of Substance,” Ms. Bradford’s 40 works of fiction sold more than 90 million copies in 40 languages and were all best sellers on both sides of the Atlantic, according to publishers’ reports.

Ten of her books were adapted for television films and mini-series, and the author, a self-described workaholic whose life mirrored the rags-to-riches stories of many of her heroines, achieved global celebrity and amassed a $300 million fortune.

She was born in England into a working-class family whose grit inspired some of her stories. Her father lost a leg in World War I, her mother was born out of wedlock, and her grandmother once labored in a workhouse for the poor. She quit school at 15, became a journalist, married an American film producer and lived for 60 years in New York. She was a self-taught novelist, publishing her first when she was 46.

Exploiting exotic locales and an arsenal of steamy liaisons, mysterious deaths and feasts of betrayal and scandal, Ms. Bradford spun tales of love and revenge, infidelity and heartbreak that lofted resolute women into glittering lives with handsome men, mansions in London or Manhattan and the board rooms of global corporations. Empires were born in her pages, and sequels turned into dynasties.

Her output was prodigious: eight books in the Emma Harte Saga, — the latest was “A Man of Honour” (2021) — spanning generations of the family of her first heroine, a servant girl who rises to forge a global department-store chain; the Ravenscar Trilogy, the epic of a family business empire in Edwardian England; and dozens of stand-alone novels with evocative titles like “Voice of the Heart” (1983), “Her Own Rules” (1996) and “The Triumph of Katie Byrne” (2001).

Ms. Bradford regarded herself as a feminist and her work an expression of feminism. But critics often called her plots formulaic, long-winded and predictable, her dialogue weak and her characters cardboard. Some also derided her claims to feminism, saying her themes of strong women rising to power were intended only to win the hearts of her largely female audience.

“Because Bradford’s heroines resemble their author in their fabulous wealth and determination — and because the author has a passing resemblance to Margaret Thatcher in the matters of hair-span and go-getter ideology — it seems to have got around that Bradford is a feminist,” Sophie Harrison said in The New York Times review of Piers Dudgeon’s biography of Ms. Bradford, “The Woman of Substance” (2006).

“Well, perhaps, in the same way that Imelda Marcos is a feminist,” Ms Harrison added, but “hers is still a world in which a woman is nothing without a husband.”

Whatever her shortcomings as a writer — and Ms. Bradford made no pretense to literary excellence — her tens of millions of readers were enthralled, and her success was undeniable. Her first novel, a classic of its genre, eventually sold 30 million copies. Her ensuing novels were best-sellers in as many as 90 countries.

“A Woman of Substance” opens with Emma Harte at 78, discovering a plot by her children to depose her as head of the department store empire she founded. As she takes revenge, flashbacks detail her rise from service in a Yorkshire household early in the 20th century, through marriages, love affairs, business rivalries and ruthless boardroom intrigues on her way to the top.

Readers were soon devouring her offerings. In 1981, on the strength of her first novel’s early sales, her agent, Morton L. Janklow, sold her next two books, as yet unwritten, to Doubleday for $3 million, then one of publishing’s biggest deals. As her career unfolded, she became an American citizen in 1992 and received honorary degrees and awards, including the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II in 2007.

Barbara Taylor was born in a suburb of Leeds, in Yorkshire, on May 10, 1933, to Winston and Freda Walker Taylor. Before her birth, her parents had a son, Vivian, who died of meningitis. Her father was an industrial engineer who was laid off during the Depression. Her mother, a nurse, supported the family. According to Ms. Bradford’s biographer, her maternal grandmother had been the servant of a Yorkshire marquis and given birth to three of his children, including Freda.

Her parents, whose marriage she fictionalized in “Act of Will” (1986), supported Barbara’s early desire to write, buying her a typewriter when she was 10 and introducing her to literature, opera and the theater. As a teenager, she read Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy and the French novelist Colette.

She quit school for a typing job at The Yorkshire Evening Post, and soon became a cub reporter. At 20, she went to London, where she became fashion editor of a magazine and a syndicated columnist for The Evening News. She also wrote celebrity profiles, covering lifestyles she would later deploy in fiction.

In 1963, she married Robert Bradford, a film and television producer, and they moved to New York. They had no children. Her husband died in 2019. She left no immediate survivors.

Ms. Bradford returned to journalism in New York and for 15 years wrote syndicated newspaper columns on interior design. In the 1960s, she also published children’s biblical stories and a trilogy called “How to Be a Perfect Wife.” Later, she reworked her newspaper columns into a series of books on interior decorating.

She had long hoped to write a novel, and during her journalism years made her first serious attempts: four suspense tales of strong women set in France or North Africa. She abandoned each of the unfinished manuscripts after a few hundred pages, concluding that all lacked authenticity.

“I now realize,” a 1991 profile in Current Biography quoted her as saying, “that as I labored I was in effect honing my craft, teaching myself how to write a novel. I truly believe that learning the craft of fiction writing is vital and that you can’t do that at classes. You can perhaps learn techniques. But no one can teach you to write a novel. You have to teach yourself.”

Resolving to seek authenticity in her own background, Ms. Bradford returned to Yorkshire to research life there in the early 20th century and to London to research World War I. Then, in what she called a rush of creativity, she began to write the story of a servant girl who rises to lead a business empire. Doubleday gave her a $25,000 advance, and three years later “A Woman of Substance” was published.

In a pattern that would continue for decades, reviews were tepid or worse. Most said the book lacked originality. But readers were wild about it.

“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,” Ms. Bradford told The Times in 1979. “It’s a matter of identification. Most novels concerning money and power are about men. I’m not going to go down in history as a great literary figure. I’m a commercial writer — a storyteller. I suppose I will always write about strong women. I don’t mean hard women, though. I mean women of substance.”