Barbara Taylor Bradford, the Leeds-born bestselling novelist affectionately known as “the grand dame of blockbusters,” has died at the age of 91.
The author honed her blockbuster-writing talents as a typist at the Yorkshire Evening Post before graduating to journalist and later becoming the paper’s first women’s editor.
She would go on to write 40 novels, selling sold more than 90m books over her career, including around 30m of her debut, A Woman of Substance, alone. That book traced the journey of Emma Harte from life as a servant in rural Yorkshire to heading a business empire.
Taylor Bradford died peacefully at her New York home on Sunday after a short illness and was “surrounded by loved ones to the very end,” a spokeswoman said.
She moved to New York in the sixties after marrying her husband, American film producer Robert Bradford, in London on Christmas Eve in 1963.
The couple were married for 55 years until he died from a stroke in 2019.
Yorkshire’s, and the wider Northern, literary and creative scene was quick to offer its condolences:
Following a private funeral in New York, the author will be buried alongside her late husband at the city’s Westchester Hills Cemetery.
Pic: Barbara Taylor Bradford by Lord Lichfield/X
