{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":10.85,"text":"Barbara Taylor Bradford was a giant of postwar British literature. "},{"start":14.792,"text":"Her 40 novels sold more than 91mn copies and she transformed the landscape of fiction, writing books about women who — like their author — set themselves goals which they achieved and surpassed. "},{"start":25.322,"text":"Her first novel, A Woman of Substance, was published in 1979 when she was 46 years old: like Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx, Penelope Fitzgerald and many other eminent women writers, success came after 40. "}],[{"start":38.96,"text":"The first volume of what became the Emma Harte Saga was a rags-to-riches tale about a poor maidservant who rises to become the founder of one of the world’s most successful department store chains. "},{"start":48.639,"text":"At the apex of her career, Taylor Bradford’s heroine remembers advice she was once given: “We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. "},{"start":56.319,"text":"We live in what we have created. "},{"start":58.124,"text":"There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades. ”"},{"start":61.917,"text":"A Woman of Substance spent 43 weeks in The New York Times bestseller lists: its author accepted the accolades. "},{"start":68.084,"text":"Her final book, The Wonder of it All, was published just last year. "}],[{"start":73.02000000000001,"text":"She was born in Upper Armley, Leeds, in 1933 to Winston and Freda Taylor. "},{"start":78.38700000000001,"text":"Her father, an engineer, had lost a leg in the first world war; her mother worked as a children’s nurse and nanny. "},{"start":84.867,"text":"Before Barbara was born, her parents lost a little boy, Vivian, to meningitis: “My mother put all her frustrated love into me,” she later said. "},{"start":93.584,"text":"She was at nursery school with another Yorkshire-born literary titan, Alan Bennett — but it was to Freda that she credited her love of literature and her determination. "},{"start":101.90200000000002,"text":"She could read before she was four and was “force-fed” Dickens. "},{"start":105.10700000000001,"text":"She was first published at the age of 10, when her mother sent a story she wrote to a children’s magazine. "},{"start":110.71200000000002,"text":"She was paid seven shillings and sixpence, and her career had begun. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":115.25,"text":"Her parents wished for her to go to university: instead, at 16 she got a job as a typist at the Yorkshire Evening Post. "},{"start":122.44200000000001,"text":"She started sneaking stories on to the subeditors’ desks — soon enough she was a reporter, the only woman in the newsroom. "},{"start":128.88400000000001,"text":"She worked alongside Keith Waterhouse, author of Billy Liar and the screenplay for Whistle Down the Wind, who took her under his wing; she met another reporter there too, whom she described as being “lanky and dishevelled with acne”. "},{"start":140.602,"text":"Many years later she found herself at an event where a movie producer introduced her to the star of his new film, Lawrence of Arabia, “the most beautiful man I’d ever seen”. "},{"start":149.43200000000002,"text":"That dishevelled fellow reporter, Peter O’Toole, had been transformed. "}],[{"start":154.09,"text":"As Taylor Bradford herself would be by her own determination. "},{"start":157.732,"text":"Having established herself as a journalist, she began to try her hand at fiction: it took her two years to write A Woman of Substance and its original draft ran to over 1,500 pages. "},{"start":167.937,"text":"It is notable that she is often described as a writer of “romances”: but this is far from accurate, a lazy dismissiveness of the true themes of her work, which are human agency and self-determination. "}],[{"start":178.48000000000002,"text":"Although she wrote a great many standalone novels, she is perhaps best known for her familial sequences: The Ravenscar Trilogy (2006-2008); The Cavendon Series (2014-2017); The House of Falconer (2018-2023). "},{"start":193.997,"text":"They are tales in which families are placed squarely in the financial and power structures of their time; they engage with history and culture; and always, women work to define themselves on their own terms. "},{"start":204.06400000000002,"text":"It is perhaps no wonder that she greatly admired Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter from Grantham whose golden helmet of hair rather closely resembled her own — writing a tribute to her in The Telegraph when she died in 2013. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":216.48000000000002,"text":"Her own life was blessed with a great romance. "},{"start":219.33400000000003,"text":"She met her husband, Robert Bradford, in 1961 when the pair were set up on a blind date. "},{"start":225.11400000000003,"text":"A film and television producer, he was responsible for bringing much of her work to the screen, most notably A Woman of Substance in 1984. "},{"start":233.06900000000002,"text":"The television mini-series starred Liam Neeson and Jenny Seagrove and received an Emmy nomination. "},{"start":238.074,"text":"They married in London on Christmas Eve 1963 and shortly thereafter moved to New York. "},{"start":243.05400000000003,"text":"The couple made their home in a grand apartment overlooking the East River where she worked at her desk, on her IBM Lexmark typewriter, from the early hours. "},{"start":251.00900000000001,"text":"She became an American citizen — but was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2007. "},{"start":256.889,"text":"Bob Bradford died of complications of a stroke in 2019; they had been married for just over 55 years. "}],[{"start":263.94,"text":"“Always present yourself as a woman who expects to succeed,” she wrote in her 2010 novel Playing the Game. "},{"start":269.944,"text":"She did just that, and proved her maxim throughout her long life. "}],[{"start":273.53,"text":""}]],"url":"https://creatives.ftmailbox.cn/album/183023-1733060929.mp3"}