Taylor Bradford was born in Leeds, where her mother “force-fed me books”, and young Barbara had her first story published at the age of 10 in a children’s magazine.
She left school at 15 to work as a typist and copytaker on the Yorkshire Evening Post, and got her first stories into the newspaper’s pages by surreptitiously slipping them into the sub-editor’s tray.
It took the editors some time to realise what she was doing, but they then promoted her to be a journalist, and she was the paper’s only female reporter at the time.
Her first books were about home design – beginning with the Complete Encyclopaedia of Homemaking Ideas in 1968 – and she wrote a string of entries in the How to be the Perfect Wife series.
Her first foray into fiction, when she was in her mid-40s, brought huge success and broke the mould.
“When I wrote A Woman of Substance I didn’t sit down and think, I’m going to write about a woman warrior who conquers the world and smashes the glass ceiling, but I did want to write about women in a positive way,” she told the Guardian in 2017, external.
“At the time there were a lot of very sexy books out there but the women didn’t come out of them very well.”
As well as A Woman of Substance, a number of her other books were turned into TV or film adaptations by her husband, Hollywood producer Robert Bradford. He died in 2019.
