A Woman of Substance. Barbara Taylor Bradford
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">TWENTY
PART FIVE The Pinnacle 1918–50
When A Woman of Substance was published thirty years ago I was thrilled and also very surprised when the book, my first novel, became such a runaway bestseller. What amazed me even more was that it reached the top of the bestseller charts in so many other countries, and was available in a variety of foreign languages. You see, when I had finished writing the book it occurred to me that perhaps it was a little too parochial, since so much of it was set in my native Yorkshire. My French publisher soon set me straight about that, ‘Nobody cares that much about location,’ he explained. ‘It’s Emma that intrigues and captivates. We all become enmeshed in her story and want to keep reading about her, to see how she ends up.’
Well, she ended up being a role model for women all around the world. I soon discovered that Emma both inspired and empowered women of all ages. She was strong and brave, bold and fearless, and she broke the glass ceiling long before that phrase was even invented. In many ways she redefined a new generation of women, and she still does today … in ninety countries and forty languages. And all I wanted to do was tell a good tale about an enterprising woman who makes it in a man’s world when women weren’t doing that.
I suppose I succeeded more than I realized at the time. Emma and her life story captured everybody’s imagination, and still does. Tough and often ruthless, brilliant when it came to dissimulations, she was an amazing businesswoman, and could be a powerful and fearsome adversary when she thought this was necessary. Yet conversely, she was kind and loving, had an understanding heart, was generous to a fault, especially to her family, and the most loyal of women.
Aside from its publishing success, A Woman of Substance was brilliantly brought to life on our television screens. Deborah Kerr played Emma as the older woman, and Jenny Seagrove was Emma from her early youth to her mid-forties.
I will never forget seeing the film for the first time in our home, long before it had been aired. I started to cry and was filled with emotion when I saw Jenny in the role of Emma, trampling across the implacable Yorkshire moors, where she bumped into a young man called Blackie O’Neill, a character who flew so easily and swiftly from my pen, and was played by Liam Neeson in the film. They were both astounding in these roles, as was Deborah Kerr and Barry Bostwick