Piers Dudgeon - The Woman of Substance - The Life and Work of Barbara Taylor Bradford

Barbara’s passion for antique furniture and modern Impressionist paintings was born of her own upbringing in Upper Armley, Leeds. ‘My mother used to take me to stately homes because she loved furniture, she loved the patinas of wood. She often took me to Temple Newsam, just outside Leeds [where the gardens also found a way into the fiction – Emma Harte’s rhododendron walk in A Woman of Substance is Temple Newsam’s], and also to Harewood House, home of the Lascelles family . . . to Ripley Castle [Langley Castle in Voice of the Heart ], and to Fountains Abbey and Fountains Hall at Studley Royal.’ These were Barbara’s childhood haunts, and it was Freda Taylor who first tuned her in to beautiful artefacts and styles of design, as if preparing her for the day when such things might be her daughter’s: ‘I always remember she used to say to me, “Barbara, keep your eyes open and then you will see all the beautiful things in the world.”’

In A Woman of Substance the optimum architecture is Georgian, and Emma Harte’s soul mate Blackie O’Neill’s dream is to have a house with Robert Adam fireplaces, Sheraton and Hepplewhite furniture, ‘and maybe a little Chippendale’.

In Angel , Johnny dwells on the paintings and antiques in his living room – a Sisley landscape, a Rouault, a Cézanne, a couple of early Van Goghs, ‘an antique Chinese coffee table of carved mahogany, French bergères from the Louis XV period, upholstered in striped cream silk . . . antique occasional tables . . . a long sofa table holding a small sculpture by Brancusi and a black basalt urn . . .’ Costume designer Rose Madigan’s attention is caught by a pair of dessert stands, ‘each one composed of two puttis standing on a raised base on either side of a leopard, their plump young arms upstretched to support a silver bowl with a crystal liner’, the silver made by master silversmith Paul Storr. There are George III candlesticks also by Storr dated 1815.

In Everything to Gain , Mallory Keswick feasts her eyes on a pair of elegant eighteenth-century French, bronze doré candlesticks, and her mother-in-law Diana buys antiques from the great houses of Europe, specialising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French furniture, decorative objects, porcelain and paintings.

For a dozen or so years leading up to publication of her first novel, Barbara wrote a nationwide syndicated column in America three times a week, about design and interior decor. She also wrote a number of books on interior design, furniture and art for American publishers Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and Meredith, long before the first commissioned A Woman of Substance . So, this design thing is, if not bred in the bone, part and parcel of her being.

But these mother and daughter trips out into the countryside had a more fundamental effect: they introduced Barbara to the landscape and spirit of Yorkshire, in which her fiction is rooted. In A Woman of Substance , Barbara sets Fairley village, where teenager Emma Harte lives with her parents and brother, Frank, in the lee of the moors which rise above the River Aire as it finds its way down into Leeds. ‘It was an isolated spot,’ she wrote, ‘desolate and uninviting, and only the pale lights that gleamed in some of the cottage windows gave credence to the idea that it was inhabited.’

Today she will say: ‘Fairley village is Haworth, but not exactly; it is the Haworth of my imagination.’ It could be anywhere in the area of the Brontës’ Haworth, Keighley or Rombalds moors. Barbara knows the area well. It lies within the regular expeditionary curtilage of her childhood home in Leeds.

The hills that rise up in an undulating sweep to dominate Fairley village and the stretch of the Aire Valley below it are always dark and brooding in the most clement of weather. But when the winter sets in for its long and deadly siege the landscape is brushstroked in grisaille beneath ashen clouds and the moors take on a savage desolateness, the stark fells and bare hillsides drained of all colour and bereft of life. The rain and snow drive down endlessly and the wind that blows in from the North Sea is fierce and raw. These gritstone hills, infinitely more sombre than the green moors of the nearby limestone dale country, sweep through vast silences broken only by the mournful wailing of the wind, for even the numerous little becks, those tumbling, dappled streams that relieve the monotony in spring and summer, are frozen and stilled.

This great plateau of moorland stretches across countless untenanted miles towards Shipley and the vigorous industrial city of Leeds beyond. It is amazingly featureless, except for the occasional soaring crags, a few blackened trees, shrivelled thorns, and abandoned ruined cottages that barely punctuate its cold and empty spaces. Perpetual mists, pervasive and thick, float over the rugged landscape, obscuring the highest peaks and demolishing the foothills, so that land and sky merge in an endless mass of grey that is dank and enveloping, and everything is diffused, without motion, wrapped in unearthly solitude. There is little evidence here of humanity, little to invite man into this inhospitable land at this time of year, and few venture out into its stark and lonely reaches.

Near here, at Ramsden Ghyll (Brimham Rocks in the film), ‘a dell between two hills . . . an eerie place, filled with grotesque rock formations and blasted tree stumps’, Lord of the Manor Adam Fairley seduces Emma’s mother, Elizabeth. There, years later, Adam’s son Edwin Fairley makes love to teenage virgin Emma Harte, the Fairley Hall kitchen maid who conceives their illegitimate child, Edwina, this episode the impetus behind a succession of events that will realise Emma’s destiny.

The heather and bracken brushed against her feet, the wind caught at her long skirts so that they billowed out like puffy clouds, and her hair was a stream of russet-brown silk ribbons flying behind her as she ran. The sky was as blue as speedwells and the larks wheeled and turned against the face of the sun. She could see Edwin quite clearly now, standing by the huge rocks just under the shadow of the Crags above Ramsden Ghyll. When he saw her he waved, and began to climb upwards towards the ledge where they always sat protected from the wind, surveying the world far below. He did not look back, but went on climbing.

‘Edwin! Edwin! Wait for me,’ she called, but her voice was blown away by the wind and he did not hear. When she reached Ramsden Crags she was out of breath and her usually pale face was flushed from exertion.

‘I ran so hard I thought I would die,’ she gasped as he helped her up on the ledge.

He smiled at her. ‘You will never die, Emma. We are both going to live for ever and ever at the Top of the World.’

When Edwin abandons Emma she wreaks vengeance on the Fairleys, at length razing Fairley Hall to the ground. Meanwhile, the geography moves some miles to the north. Emma’s centre in Yorkshire becomes Pennistone Royal, with its ‘Renaissance and Jacobean architecture . . . crenellated towers . . . mullioned leaded windows’ and ‘clipped green lawns that rolled down to the lily pond far below the long flagged terrace’. The model is Fountains Hall on the Studley Royal Estate, Ripon, gateway to the Yorkshire Dales and another of Barbara’s childhood haunts, while Pennistone Royal village is neighbouring Studley Roger.

Why should an author who left North Yorkshire as soon as she could, found success and glamour in London as a journalist on Fleet Street, married a Hollywood film producer and moved lock, stock and barrel to a swish apartment in New York City, return to her homeland for the setting of her first novel, a novel that featured a character whose spirit seems at first sight more closely in tune with the go-getting ethos of Manhattan than the dour North Yorkshire moors? The answer to that is, broadly, the text of this book.