Barbara Taylor Bradford OBE (10 May 1933 – 24 November 2024)[3] was a British-American best-selling novelist. Her debut novel, A Woman of Substance, was published in 1979 and sold over 30 million copies worldwide.[4] She wrote 40 novels, all bestsellers in England and the United States.
Barbara Taylor was born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England[5] to Freda and Winston Taylor. Her father was an engineer who had lost a leg while serving in the First World War.[6] She attended a nursery school in the Leeds suburb of Upper Armley alongside the writer Alan Bennett.[6] As a child during the Second World War, she held a jumble sale at her school and donated the £2 proceeds to the "Aid to Russia" fund. She later received a handwritten thank-you letter from Clementine Churchill, the wife of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.[7]

Her older brother Vivian died of meningitis before she was born. She later described her mother as having "put all her frustrated love into me."[8] Her parents' marriage is fictionalized in her 1986 novel An Act of Will.[6]

In her youth, Barbara Taylor read Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, and Colette.[9] At the age of ten she decided to be a writer after sending a story to a magazine. She was paid 7s 6d for the story, with which she bought handkerchiefs and a green vase for her parents.[6]

Taylor Bradford's biographer, Piers Dudgeon, later uncovered evidence that her mother Freda Walker was the illegitimate daughter of Oliver Robinson, 2nd Marquess of Ripon, a local Yorkshire landowner who employed her mother, Edith Walker, as a servant. Dudgeon informed Taylor Bradford that her grandmother and Ripon had had three children together. After some hesitation, Taylor Bradford allowed Dudgeon to publish this information in his biography.[6] Although initially angry at Dudgeon's discovery, she later said that "I came round. There's no stigma now."[6] Her grandmother later spent time in workhouses,[6] which Taylor Bradford explored in the ITV television series Secrets of the Workhouse (2013).[10]