Barbara Taylor Bradford, million-selling novelist known for ‘A Woman of Substance,’ has died at 91

NEW YORK — Barbara Taylor Bradford, a British journalist who became a publishing sensation in her 40s with the saga “A Woman of Substance” and wrote more than a dozen other novels that sold tens of millions of copies, has died. Starting with “A Woman of Substance,” published in 1979, Bradford averaged nearly a book a year as one of the world’s most popular and wealthiest writers, her net worth estimated at more than $200 million and her fame so high that her image appeared on a postage stamp in 1999. Her favorite among her books was “The Women In His Life,” inspired by her husband’s escape from the Nazis Bradford was married for 56 years to German-born film producer Robert Bradford, who died in 2019. According to an authorized 2006 biography, Piers Dudgeon’s “The Woman of Substance,” Bradford more than adapted to her midlife fortune, living in a 5,300 square foot apartment overlooking Manhattan’s East River, collecting Impressionist art and enjoying refills of pink champagne poured by her Moroccan butler.