The Woman of Substance. Piers Dudgeon

Royal, Second Marquess of Ripon. (Ripon Library)

       33. Ripon Union Workhouse, known as the Grubber in Edith’s day.

       Section 3

      34 and 35. The offices of The Yorkshire Evening Post, where Barbara worked from fifteen. (Yorkshire Post)

       36. Barbara as YEP Woman’s Page Assistant at seventeen. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       37. Barbara at nineteen, as Woman’s Page Editor. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       38. Barbara’s sometime colleague, Keith Waterhouse, the celebrated commentator, playwright and author, with his collaborator, playwright Willis Hall. (Yorkshire Post)

      39. Barbara in 1953, aged twenty, when she left Leeds for London to work as a Fashion Editor on Woman’s Own. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       40. Peter O’Toole with Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. (Columbia Pictures)

       41. Barbara’s husband, film producer Robert Bradford. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       42. Barbara after her uprooting to New York. (Cris Alexander/Bradford Photo Archive)

       43. Barbara’s mother, Freda Taylor, a long way from home on Fifth Avenue, New York.

       44. Barbara, the writer. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       45. Barbara, multi-million-selling author of A Woman of Substance. (Cris Alexander/Bradford Photo Archive)

       Section 4

       46. Robert Bradford with the book that realised a dream. (Bradford Photo Archive).

       47. Jenny Seagrove as Emma Harte, the woman of substance. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       48. Deborah Kerr takes over as the older Emma, with Sir John Mills as Henry Rossiter, Emma’s financial adviser. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       49. Stars of To Be the Best, Lindsay Wagner and Sir Anthony Hopkins. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       50. Barbara with the stars of To Be the Best, Fiona Fullerton, Lindsay Wagner, Christopher Cazenove and Sir Anthony Hopkins (Bradford Photo Archive)

       51. Victoria Tenant as Audra Crowther and Kevin McNally as Vincent Crowther in Act of Will. (Odyssey Video from the DVD release Act of Will)

       52. Barbara’s bichons frises, Beaji and Chammi. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       53. Alan Bennett and Barbara receiving the degree of Doctor of Letters from Leeds University in 1990. (Yorkshire Post)

       54. Barbara with Reg Carr, sometime Keeper of the Barbara Taylor Bradford archive at the Brotherton Library in Leeds. (Bradford Photo Archive)

       55. Barbara Taylor Bradford by Lord Lichfield. (Bradford Photo Archive)

PREFACE

      Exploring one of the world’s most successful writers through the looking glass of her fiction is an idea particularly well suited in the case of Barbara Taylor Bradford, whose fictional heroines draw on their creator’s character and chart the emotional contours of her own experience, and whose own history so often emerges from the shadowland between fact and fiction.

      She turned out to be unstintingly generous with her time, advising me about real-life places, episodes and events in the novels, despite a hectic round of her own, which included the writing of two novels, the launch of her nineteenth novel, Emma’s Secret (2003), a high-profile legal action in India against a TV film company suspected of purloining her books and films, a grand party celebrating a quarter of a century with publishers HarperCollins, and a schedule of charity events, which film producer, business manager and husband Robert Bradford arranged for her – oh, and a week or so’s holiday.

      Barbara’s first novel, A Woman of Substance, is, according to Publishers Weekly, the eighth biggest-selling novel ever to be published. It has sold more than twenty-five million copies worldwide. In it, so reviewers will tell you, we have the classic Cinderella story. Emma Harte rises from maid to matriarch; the impoverished Edwardian kitchen maid comes, through her own efforts, to rule over a business empire that stretches from Yorkshire to America and Australia.

      What it took to escape the constraints of the Edwardian and later twentieth-century English class system is at the heart of Barbara’s family’s own story too. Her rise to bestselling novelist and icon for emancipated womanhood, currently valued at some $170 million, from a two-up two-down in Leeds is by any standard extraordinary. Her elevation coincided with the post-war drift from an Edwardian upstairs/downstairs class system (into which Barbara’s mother Freda was born), reconstructed by socialism in the period of Barbara’s own childhood, to one ultimately sensible to merit, a transformation which finds symbolic incidence in the year 1979, in which A Woman of Substance was first published and that champion of meritocracy, Margaret Thatcher, who had risen from the lower middle classes to become Britain’s first female Prime Minister, arrived at No. 10 Downing Street.

      Barbara’s novels, which encourage women to believe they can conquer the world, whatever their class or background and despite the fact that they are operating in a man’s domain, tapped into the aspirational energy of this era and served to expedite social change. Indeed, it might be said that Barbara Taylor Bradford would have invented Margaret Thatcher if she had not already existed. When they met, there was a memorable double take of where ambition had led them. ‘I was invited to a reception at Number Ten,’ Barbara recalls. ‘I saw a picture of Churchill in the hall outside the reception room and slipped out to look at it. Mrs Thatcher followed me out and asked if I was all right. I just said: “I never thought a girl from Yorkshire like me would be standing here at the invitation of the Prime Minister looking at a portrait of Churchill inside ten Downing Street,” and she whispered: “I know what you mean.”’

      More intriguingly, in the process of writing fiction, ideas arise which owe their genesis not to the culture of an era, but to the author’s inner experience, and here, as any editor knows, lie the most compelling parts of a writer’s work. Barbara is the first to agree: ‘It’s very hard when you’ve just finished a novel to define what you’ve really written about other than what seems to be the verity on paper. There’s something else there underlying it subconsciously in the writer’s mind, and that I might be able to give you later.’ She promised this to journalist Billie Figg in the early 1980s, but never delivered, though the prospect is especially enticing, given that she can also say: ‘My typewriter is my psychiatrist.’

      There is no pearl without first there being grit in the oyster. The grit may lie in childhood experience, possibly only partly understood or deliberately blanked out, buried and unresolved by the defence mechanisms of the conscious mind. Unawares, the subconscious generates the ideas that claw at a writer’s inner self and drive his or her best fiction.

      Barbara shies away from such talk, denouncing inspiration – it is, she says, something that she has never ‘had’. She admits that on occasion she finds herself strangely moved by a place and gets feelings of déjà vu, even of having been part of something that happened before she was born, but mostly she sees herself as a storyteller, a creator of stories, happy to draw on her own life, all of it perfectly conscious and practical. Later we will see how she works up a novel out of her characters, which is indeed a conscious process. But subconscious influences are by their very nature not known to the conscious mind, and we will also see that echoes of a past unknown do indeed inhabit her writing.

      Barbara will tell you that it was her mother, Freda, who made her who she is today. Mother and daughter were so close, and Freda so determined an influence, that their relationship reads almost like a conspiracy in Barbara’s future success. Freda was on a mission, ‘a crusade’, but it wasn’t quite the selfless mission that