A Woman of Substance

Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance

When life wounds or pains me, I escape into books. I always have.

Lately, life insists on throwing boulders in my path, not mere stones.

When that happens, I turn to books on the so-called lighter side. No Dostoevsky or Sartre for me!

When news came of Barbara Taylor Bradford‘s passing on November 24, 2024, BookBub featured her A Woman of Substance (1979). I’d never read it, so on a whim I opted for the Kindle edition. Somehow, I just couldn’t imagine lying in bed balancing a book of over 900 pages in paperback, much less hardcover.

Note that if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, you can read the novel for “free.”

Ms. Bradford’s first published novel, A Woman of Substance immediately became a bestseller and has sold over 30 million copies so far.

Anyway, that very night I began reading it.

A Woman of Substance relates the rags-to-riches story of Emma Harte, a woman who, despite obscure beginnings, became very successful in business. The novel also offers an insight into English life, with its rigid class system. Ms. Bradford sprinkles in bits and pieces of history, especially about interior design, which she often wrote of as a journalist.

Emma started her business empire with food and cooking—a small shop with a unique slant. Through that, she managed to achieve her dreams of becoming rich at a time when women of any class enjoyed few options in life other than marriage or the nunnery. When the novel first appeared in 1979, her story likely motivated women to rethink their own situations.

Don’t forget that until just five years earlier, in 1974, women in the United States couldn’t get a credit card without a male co-signer … just fifty years ago as of this writing.

Thus, Emma’s story resonated heavily with readers at the time, the world of women in 1979.

But what about today? How does the novel stand up to the passage of time?

As I read the novel, I noticed some things that MFA writing instructors today would scream about. They’d probably flunk Ms. Bradford, to be honest. Editors might even toss her manuscripts in the trash. Or at least demand rewrites and prunings.

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of A Woman of Substance:

A faint smile played around her implacable mouth, curving the resolute line of the lips with unfamiliar softness, as she thought with some pleasure of Pennistone Royal. That great house that grew up out of the stark and harsh landscape of the moors and which always appeared to her to be a force of nature engineered by some Almighty architect rather than a mere edifice erected by mortal man. 

Major issues with the text as mentioned in reader reviews written decades after the book’s publication include the following criticisms:

Adjectives.

Adverbs.

Telling, not showing.

Swift changes in point of view.

Awkward dialogue.

Long descriptions of settings.

Obscure words.

And yet – a great story. No, great STORYTELLING.

Storytelling. What humans did around campfires, in caves, from the very beginning of humanity. The creation of legends and myth and prophecy. Fantasy, even.

A Woman of Substance is what you’d want with you on a desert island. Thick, meaty, full of historical and cultural asides, love, sex, power, money, beauty, and more. The type of story you sink into as you read, where only a chime from your phone can bring you back to reality, your eyes blinking as if you’ve emerged from a very pleasant dream. Or from a dark movie theater into the brightness of day.

Again, fantasy.

Unlike many novels today, A Woman of Substance isn’t vying for great literature. Ms. Bradford herself said, “”I’m not going to go down in history as a great literary figure. I’m a commercial writer—a storyteller. I suppose I will always write about strong women. I don’t mean hard women, though. I mean women of substance.”

Fine with me.

BTW, a film version of A Woman Substance came out in 1985 and is currently available on Acorn TV.