Best-selling romance author Barbara Taylor Bradford has earned a wide readership with her mainstream fiction featuring strong women who succeed against all odds. As a Contemporary Popular Writers essayist stated: "It is in capturing the complexities within women that Barbara Taylor Bradford succeeds. Truly a commercial storyteller, Bradford adds class to a genre that receives little respect."

Prior to her 1979 best-selling debut as a novelist with A Woman of Substance, Bradford published several books for juveniles and a number of nonfiction works, among them The Complete Encyclopedia of Homemaking Ideas, How to Be the Perfect Wife: Etiquette to Please Him, and Easy Steps to Successful Decorating. A former journalist covering everything from crime to show business, Bradford expressed great satisfaction over the turn her writing career has taken since 1980. As of 2005, Bradford's works had sold more than eighty million copies, had been translated into more than forty languages, and were published in more than ninety countries. Ten of her novels were adapted as television miniseries and movies of the week.

A Woman of Substance has become a classic, selling over nineteen million copies worldwide. The book begins the saga of Emma Harte, a Yorkshire woman who rises from obscurity to found a great retail empire and family dynasty and to enact revenge on the family of a young man who seduced and abandoned her when she was a girl. In the New York Times, Bradford characterized Emma as "a powerful woman who started with nothing but acquired dignity and polish." Bradford added that she strove to make Emma--and her other female characters as well--"tough but not hard."

While a strong female lead is almost a given in Bradford's novels, many critics contend that her books are far from formulaic. Her writings often illuminate interesting or little-known aspects of history. For example, Her Own Rules explores the British practice of exiling children in orphanages, who were often not orphans, to the far corners of the empire--a practice that continued even after World War II. Other books simply offer enjoyable entertainment. For example, Love in Another Town details a complicated May-September romance, and A Secret Affair is the story of an illicit affair that plunges into mystery. Bradford says, "The most personal novel I've written is called The Women in His Life. It is based loosely upon the experiences of my husband, Bob, who survived the Nazis and escaped from Germany as a young child. I've always thought of this to be my most gratifying work."

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 Revised: 07/03/08.