Barbara Taylor Bradford

Barbara Taylor Bradford (born 10 May 1933) is a best-selling British-American novelist. Her debut novel, A Woman of Substance, was published in 1979 and sold over 30 million copies worldwide. She wrote 39 novels, all bestsellers in England and the United States. Early life Barbara Taylor was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England to Freda and Winston Taylor. Her father was an engineer who had lost a leg while serving in the First World War. She attended a nursery school in the Leeds suburb of Upper Armley alongside the writer Alan Bennett. 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. 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." Her parents' marriage is fictionalized in her 1986 novel An Act of Will. In her youth, Barbara Taylor read Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, and Colette. 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.