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.
She was made an OBE for services to literature by Queen Elizabeth in 2007, and was also an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust.
In its tribute, the charity hailed her as “a passionate advocate for improving literacy skills throughout her life”, and said she “helped change lives in some of the UK’s most disadvantaged communities”.
