Blockbuster author who embodied the rags-to-riches heroines featured in books

Barbara Taylor Bradford was as famous for her lavish lifestyle as she was for a formidable work ethic

- Claire Allfree

“The day I get a good review in The New York Times I’ll kill myself,” once said the novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford who, following a short illness, has died at the age of 91. “They only give good reviews to books that don’t sell.”

Taylor Bradford, known affectionately across the industry as BTB, certainly never had to worry about her books not selling. Her career can be summed up in astronomical numbers – 40 books published; 91 million books sold and the rights to 90 countries. Her 1979 debut A Woman of Substance is one of the top-selling novels ever published. At one point she was Britain’s second wealthiest woman after the late Queen.

BTB is the last of the great dowager British female authors – a select group that also included Barbara Cartland and Jackie Collins (and might have also numbered Catherine Cookson, had Cookson not led such a humble life first in Hastings and then in the North East). Each was as notorious for their stately, idiosyncratic, sometimes transatlantic lifestyle as for the cheerfully formulaic bestselling blockbusters they churned out with cuckoo clock regularity – and which won them the devoted affection of a large and overwhelmingly female fan base.

In the case of BTB, her novels invariably told the story of an indomitable, spirited young girl from an impoverished background who fought hardship to make a success of her life while having plenty of “nice sex” along the way; BTB would sniff at anything remotely vulgar. As a writer she had an undeniable common touch, combining relatable protagonists with sweeping, frequently historical settings – even if her prose favoured overheated metaphor over nuance and lacked a certain narrative elan. Her novels were “racy”, dryly commented the journalist Andrew Billen once, “but they didn’t race”.