NEW YORK– Barbara Taylor Bradford, a British journalist who became a publishing sensation at 40 with the saga “A Woman of Substance” and wrote more than a dozen other novels that sold tens of millions of copies, has died. She was 91.

Bradford died Sunday at her home in New York City, a spokesperson said Monday.

Beginning with “A Woman of Substance,” published in 1979, Bradford averaged almost a book a year as one of the world’s most popular and wealthiest writers. Her net worth was estimated at over $200 million and her fame was so high that her image appeared on television. a postage stamp in 1999. In 2007, Queen Elizabeth II awarded her an OBE (The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire).

Her books have been published in 40 languages ​​and sold more than 90 million copies worldwide.

With titles such as ‘Breaking the Rules’ and ‘Act of Will’, she specialized in stories about women who fought for love and power in a man’s world. Her favorite among her books was “The Women In His Life,” inspired by her husband’s escape from the Nazis

Bradford was married for 56 years to German-born film producer Robert Bradford, who died in 2019.

Originally from Leeds, West Yorkshire, she was an only child in a working-class family who loved books from an early age. As a girl, she had a story published in a local magazine. At the age of 16, she left school, against her parents’ wishes, to become a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post. Over the next thirty years she would work as fashion editor of Woman’s Own Magazine, cover a variety of beats for the London Evening News and, in the United States, write a syndicated column on interior design.

Although she wrote children’s stories and advice books, novels were her dream. “A Woman of Substance” was a multi-generational chronicle of the trials and triumphs of shop baron Emma Harte, who would be featured in several other Bradford novels. The book has sold more than 30 million copies and was the basis of a 1984 television miniseries starring Jenny Seagrove as young Emma and Deborah Kerr as Emma in later life.

“And if you want to meet the real Emma, ​​you have to meet me,” Bradford told the Telegraph of London in 2009. “Emma had to be tough and ruthless at times: but so am I. I have to be that too, as a businesswoman. And I’m a damn good businesswoman.”

Bradford and Emma Harte were not only connected by money: both had family secrets. As a young woman, Emma became pregnant by a man who refused to marry her and gave birth to a daughter. Years later, Bradford learned through her biographer that her own mother had been born out of wedlock. It is now believed that Bradford’s maternal grandfather was Frederick Oliver Robinson, the second Marquess of Ripon and owner of the Studley Royal estate in Yorkshire, now a World Heritage Site.

Seagrove, who befriended Bradford after starring in the miniseries, described her as a “powerhouse of glamor and warmth” and a “force of nature” who stayed true to her roots.

“Success never diluted her warmth and humor, nor her ability to relate to everyone she met, whether it was a janitor or a princess,” Seagrove said. “She never, ever forgot that she was just a Yorkshire girl who worked hard and made good. RIP dear friend.”

Bradford had a strict writing routine: work at her IBM Lexmark typewriter at six in the morning, take a break around one in the afternoon, and then write again no later than six o’clock. According to an authorized 2006 biography, Piers Dudgeon’s “The Woman of Substance,” Bradford more than adjusted to her midlife fortunes, living in a 5,000-square-foot apartment overlooking Manhattan’s East River, collecting Impressionist art and she enjoyed refills of pink champagne poured by her Moroccan wife. butler. When the Bradfords put their apartment up for sale in 2010, the asking price was just under $19 million. (They sold it to Uma Thurman for $10 million in 2013).

Over the years she met many other celebrities. Bradford befriended Sean Connery before appearing in his first James Bond film and recalled advising him, thankfully in vain, to lose his Scottish accent if he wanted to succeed.

Around the same time she met a fellow journalist at the Yorkshire Evening Post. He was “lanky and disheveled with acne” and kept trying to talk to her even after she turned him down for a date at the movies.

He was Peter O’Toole.

“Years later, (Evening Post editor) Keith Waterhouse and I were at an event where producer Sam Spiegel introduced the star of his new film,” she told The Guardian in 2021. “The most beautiful man I had ever seen walked out, dressed as Lawrence of Arabia. Keith said, ‘Don’t you wish you had gone to the movies with him now?’ I never got over Peter’s transformation.”