A Woman of Substance
The unputdownable multi-million copy bestseller charting the rags to riches story of Emma Harte.In 1905 a young kitchen maid leaves Fairley Hall. Emma Harte is sixteen, single and pregnant.By 1968 she is one of the richest women in the world, ruler of a business empire stretching from Yorkshire to the glittering cities of America and the rugged vastness of Australia. But what is the price she has paid?A Woman of Substance is as impossible to put down as it is to forget. This multi-million copy bestseller is truly a novel of our times.
Читать A Woman of Substance онлайн беплатно
BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD
A Woman of Substance
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Grafton 1981
Copyright © Barbara Taylor Bradford 1979
Barbara Taylor Bradford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007321421
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007346943
Version: 2018-08-22
To discover more about Barbara’s books and sign up for her newsletter, visit www.barbarataylorbradford.co.uk
‘Memorable and moving … a sure-fire winner’
Express
‘Queen of the genre’
Sunday Times
‘Few novelists are as consummate as Barbara Taylor Bradford at keeping the reader turning the page. She is one of the best at spinning yarns’
Guardian
‘The storyteller of substance’
The Times
‘A sweeping saga full of passion and intrigue’
Hello!
For Bob and my parents – who know the reason why
The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them; a man may live long, yet get little from life.
Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.
– MONTAIGNE, Essays
I have the heart of a man, not of a woman, and I am not afraid of anything …
– ELIZABETH I, Queen of England
CONTENTS
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.
