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Tweet Facebook Mail 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. She was 91. Bradford died on Sunday at her home in New York City, a spokesperson said on Monday.

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 $US200 million ($307 million) and her fame so high that her image appeared on a postage stamp in 1999. In 2007, Queen Elizabeth II awarded her an OBE (The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). READ MORE: DNA confirms man who had passed polygraph test as suspected killer in cold case  An undated photo issued by Bradford Enterprises of Barbara Taylor Bradford.



(Caroll Taveras/Bradford Enterprises via AP) Her books were published in 40 languages and sold more than 90 million copies around the world. With titles like Breaking the Rules and Act of Will , she specialised in stories of women fighting for love and power in a man's world. Her favourite 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.

A native of Leeds, West Yorkshire, she was an only child in a working class family who loved books early. As a girl, she had .

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