Barbara Taylor Bradford, million-selling novelist known for ’A Woman of Substance,’ has died at 91

Barbara Taylor Bradford, bestselling author of "A Woman of Substance," dies at 91, leaving behind a literary legacy.

Barbara Taylor Bradford, a British journalist who became a publishing sensation in her 40s with the saga “A Woman of Substance” and wrote more than a dozen other novels that sold tens of millions of copies, has died. She was 91.

Ms. Bradford died Sunday (November 24, 2024) at her home in New York City, a spokesperson said Monday (November 25, 2024).

Starting with “A Woman of Substance,” published in 1979, Ms. Bradford averaged nearly a book a year as one of the world’s most popular and wealthiest writers, her net worth estimated at more than $200 million and her fame so high that her image appeared on a postage stamp in 1999. In 2007, Queen Elizabeth II awarded her an OBE (The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire).

Her books were published in 40 languages and sold more than 90 million copies around the world.

With titles like “Breaking the Rules’‘ and ‘Act of Will,’‘ she specialised in stories of women fighting for love and power in a man’s world. Her favourite among her books was “The Women In His Life,” inspired by her husband’s escape from the Nazis

Ms. Bradford was married for 56 years to German-born film producer Robert Bradford, who died in 2019.

A native of Leeds, West Yorkshire, she was an only child in a working-class family who loved books early. As a girl, she had a story published in a local magazine. By age 16, she left school against her parents’ wishes to become a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post. Over the next 30 years, she would work as fashion editor of Woman’s Own Magazine, cover a variety of beats for the London Evening News and, in the United States, write a syndicated column about interior design.