The news that the novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford died on Sunday, at the age of 91, brought me right back to the library my family frequented when I was a kid, where her fat, pastel-colored paperbacks preened from the carousels to the right of the entrance. That’s where the most popular, most commercial books hung out, separated from the quiet dignity of the rest of the place. It was there that my mother would find me come checkout time, surrounded first by tween smut from Sweet Valley High, then by rapes and murders from Mary Higgins Clark, and then by tales of riches, betrayals and come-from-behind triumphs from Barbara Taylor Bradford.
I knew at the time that Ms. Bradford wasn’t considered an important writer like the distinguished Europeans my highbrow sister was reading. Certainly she wasn’t winning fancy literary awards or critical accolades. In one Times review, the critic Andrew Postman sneered that she “manages uncannily to do precisely what good storytelling does not — to make a ‘sweeping’ saga parochial.” But her books called me in, with heroines that succeeded not because of the men in their lives but because of intelligence and hard work. From them, I learned that while romance was exciting and at times consuming, a woman’s primary purpose was to make something of herself in a world either indifferent or hostile to her efforts.
It wasn’t just me. Ms. Bradford sold more than 90 million books, including 30 million copies of “A Woman of Substance” alone, making it one of the best-selling novels of all time. She did it because her books centered protagonists who were substantive, driven and career-oriented, bucking trends in both romance and literary fiction. They taught women in the ’80s and ’90s that feminism needn’t exclude erotic pleasure, and that action, not passivity, was a feminine trait. Her readers’ loyalty earned her a personal fortune rumored to rival that of Queen Elizabeth II. She has graced postage stamps, was awarded the Order of the British Empire and had 10 books adapted into mini-series and films.
But even those metrics can’t capture what she meant to her readers, who stuck with her through 40 books. They did it because her characters were as real and legible to them as they were to Ms. Bradford herself. Other novelists won prestigious accolades, impressed reviewers and inspired graduate students in M.F.A. programs. Barbara Taylor Bradford changed the way readers who might not have any connection to the shifting sands of literary fashion thought about themselves and their world. She should be recognized as one of the most influential American novelists of the last half-century.
“A Woman of Substance,” a period novel set in turn-of-the-century Yorkshire, was the first installment of what would grow to be an eight-book series about a self-made retail tycoon named Emma Harte. Ms. Bradford has said she modeled Harte partly on Queen Elizabeth I, partly on Catherine the Great and partly on herself. Over decades, she traced Harte’s legacy across multiple generations, eras and business ventures while championing the character’s boldly moral acts, despite the frequently high cost. “One of the reasons my books are so successful all around the world is that I write about women of integrity,” she told AudioFile magazine. “They have honor, they have discipline, they are hardworking, and they go out and conquer the world.”
The series covers, among other topics, the privileges and perils of the retail business, the British class system, family estrangement, hidden relatives, divorce, corporate alliances, the fashion industry, long-term marriage, tragic accidents, corporate takeovers, wartime romance and inheritance battles, while also tucking in an almost Jamesian number of details about fancy homes and attire. (For years Ms. Bradford wrote about fashion and interior design for popular journals.) The only reason I know a thing about Edwardian tea sets, Lear jets or draperies is because of what she elegantly wove into her narratives. When I first visited Harrods in London, I was disappointed to find it wasn’t as impressive as I’d imagined Harte’s luxury emporium to be.
You can see Ms. Bradford’s shadow in the pacing of the blockbuster romance novelist Jackie Collins and in the page-turning propulsion of contemporary writers like Paula Hawkins and Gillian Flynn. Multigenerational family sagas are everywhere these days, but when Ms. Bradford published “A Woman of Substance,” I am pretty sure there were zero featuring a woman at the helm of a powerful business.
I’m more impressed, though, by her influence on readers. “Thank you for giving me the start to wonderful adventures, to meeting new people and visiting fantastic places within the covers of books,” one reader recently wrote on Ms. Bradford’s Facebook page. “I hadn’t read a book since high school. But that book! Made me fall in love with reading again,” another confessed, “and I’ve never stopped!”
Feeling nostalgic, I abandoned duty for a day this week and curled up with Ms. Bradford’s most famous novel, which was just as I remembered it: cunning, sweeping and melodramatic in the best way. But this time I saw something else in it: a skeleton key for the whole of Ms. Bradford’s career and legacy. The book opens with Emma Harte ill and under threat from all sides, including her conniving children. (Sound familiar?) Undaunted, she tells her granddaughter, “Being underestimated by men is one of the biggest crosses I’ve had to bear all of my life … However, it was also an advantage and one I learned to make great use of.”
Ms. Bradford didn’t claim excellence or boast about her accomplishments. She told this newspaper: “I’m not going to go down in history as a great literary figure. I’m a commercial writer — a storyteller.” She’s right. But as I reread “A Woman of Substance,” I saw an earnest desire to draw a female character for whom no twist of fate is insurmountable. And I, a woman feeling frequently surmounted by obstacles these days, found myself quite moved by this portrayal, and even cried a little. And then I did what Emma Harte would do: I dried my tears, dusted myself off, resolved to be a woman of substance and got right back to work.
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