A towering goddess of late 20th-century fiction, the novelist sold a different way of living to women who did not have choices – and she made all of her own dreams come true

• Novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford dies aged 91

What on earth must it have been like, in Yorkshire in the 1930s, having both Barbara Taylor, as she then was, and Alan Bennett in the same nursery class?

Whatever they had in the water back there, Barbara Taylor Bradford, like Jackie Collins and Shirley Conran, was one of the great transatlantic towering goddesses of late 20th-century fiction.