Section 2
21. 1909 Map of Ripon, when Barbara’s mother, Freda, was five.
22. Ripon Minster. (Ripon Library)
23. Ripon Market Place as Freda and her mother, Edith, knew it. (Ripon Library)
24. The Wakeman Hornblower, who still announces the watch each night at 9 p.m. (Ripon Library)
25. Water Skellgate in 1904, the year that Edith Walker gave birth there to Freda. (Ripon Library)
26. The stepping stones on the Skell where Freda fell. (Ripon Library)
27. One of Ripon’s ancient courts, like the one where Freda was born.
28. Freda dressed in her best at fourteen. (Bradford Photo Archive)
29. Studley Royal Hall, home of the Marquesses of Ripon. (Ripon Library)
30. Fountains Hall, on which Pennistone Royal in the Emma Harte novels is based. (Ripon Library)
31. Edith Walker, Barbara’s maternal grandmother. (Bradford Photo Archive)
32. Frederick Oliver Robinson of Studley 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)
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)
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)
49. Stars of To Be the Best, Lindsay Wagner and Sir Anthony Hopkins. (Bradford Photo Archive)
52. Barbara’s bichons frises, Beaji and Chammi. (Bradford Photo Archive)
55. Barbara Taylor Bradford by Lord Lichfield. (Bradford Photo Archive)
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