Barbara Taylor Bradford – a Saturnine success

Writer Barbara Taylor Bradford, known for a string of best-selling epic novels which spawned sequels and TV adaptations like A Woman of Substance, has died at the age of 91. She had a ferocious work ethic, inspired by her mother who was mourning a son lost before her birth and poured her determination into her daughter.

 She was born 10 May 1933, no birth time, Leeds, and later discovered her mother Freda Walker was the illegitimate daughter of a local landowner who employed her mother as a servant and they had three children together. Her grandmother later spent time in workhouses.

 Barbara read books avidly – Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, and Colette – left school at 15, started life as a journalist, became a fashion and design writer and launched into writing 40 novels after the age of 40 with her first book selling 30 million copies worldwide. She had a long marriage to a Hollywood film producer who produced her work on screen.

  She was a charming Sun Venus in Taurus in a persuasive sextile to Pluto and a hard-working, determined square to Saturn in Aquarius. Her Moon was probably Scorpio – and if so her Saturn was doubly emphasised being on the focal point of a Fixed T Square to her Venus Sun opposition Moon; and on the focal point of a wide-ish yod inconjunct Pluto and Jupiter. Which would explain her workaholic tendencies.

Her Mercury in Taurus was trine a publicity-attracting Mars Neptune in Virgo.

 What is fascinating is how many showbusiness names came out of 1933 with the glitzy Mars, Neptune, Jupiter in Virgo combo which stayed together for several months – Quincy Jones, Yoko Ono, Michael Caine, Gene Wilder, Willie Nelson, Nina Simone, Joan Rivers, Joan Collins.

[A tragic irony that her story follows one on the plight of Afghani women who are being deprived not only of intellectual and creative sustenance but any chance of doing what she did to make a life for herself out of words.]