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 Sunday at her home in New York City, a spokesperson said Monday. An obituary was also posted to her website.

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 $200 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).

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 specialized in stories of women fighting for love and power in a man’s world. Her favorite 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 a story published in a local magazine. By age 16, she left school against her parents’ wishes to become a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post. Over the next 30 years, she would work as fashion editor of Woman’s Own Magazine, cover a variety of beats for the London Evening News and, in the United States, write a syndicated column about interior design.

Although she wrote children’s stories and advice books, novels were her dream. “A Woman of Substance” was a multi-generational chronicle of the travails and triumphs of retail baron Emma Harte, who would be featured in several other Bradford novels. The book has sold more than 30 million copies and was the basis of a 1984 television miniseries starring Jenny Seagrove as a young Emma and Deborah Kerr as Emma late in life.

“And if you want to meet the real Emma, meet me,” Bradford told the Telegraph of London in 2009. “Emma had to be tough and ruthless at times: but then so am I. I have to be, as a businesswoman. And I’m a bloody good businesswoman.”

Bradford and Emma Harte were linked by more than money: both had family secrets. As a young woman, Emma became pregnant by a man who refused to marry her and gave birth to a daughter. Years later, Bradford learned through her biographer that her own mother had been born out of wedlock. It is now believed that Bradford’s maternal grandfather was Frederick Oliver Robinson, the second Marquess of Ripon and owner of the Studley Royal estate in Yorkshire, which is now a World Heritage Site.

Seagrove, who became friends with Bradford after starring in the miniseries, described her as a “powerhouse of glamour and warmth” and a “force of nature” who stayed true to her roots.

“Success never diluted her warmth and humor or her ability to relate to everyone she met, whether a cleaner or a princess,” Seagrove said. “She never, ever forgot that she was just a girl from Yorkshire that worked hard and made good. RIP dear friend.”

Bradford had a strict writing routine: at work behind her IBM Lexmark typewriter by 6 a.m., break around 1 p.m., then back to writing until 6 p.m., at the latest. According to an authorized 2006 biography, Piers Dudgeon’s “The Woman of Substance,” Bradford more than adapted to her midlife fortune, living in a 5,300 square foot apartment overlooking Manhattan’s East River, collecting Impressionist art and enjoying refills of pink champagne poured by her Moroccan butler. When the Bradfords put their apartment up for sale in 2010, the asking price was just under $19 million. (They sold it to Uma Thurman in 2013 for $10 million).

Over the years, she met many other celebrities. Bradford befriended Sean Connery before he appeared in his first James Bond movie and remembered advising him, thankfully in vain, that he should lose his Scottish accent if he wanted to succeed.

Around the same time, she met a fellow journalist at the Yorkshire Evening Post. He was “lanky and disheveled with acne,” and kept trying to talk to her even after she turned him down for a date at the movies.

He was Peter O’Toole.

“Years later, (Evening Post editor) Keith Waterhouse and I were at an event where the producer Sam Spiegel introduced the star of his new movie,” she told The Guardian in 2021. “Out walked the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, dressed as Lawrence of Arabia. Keith said: ‘Don’t you wish you’d gone to the pictures with him now?’ I never got over Peter’s transformation.”

Just as there are good odds the turkey will taste dry, airports and highways are expected to be jam-packed during Thanksgiving week, a holiday period likely to end in another record day for air travel in the United States.

The people responsible for keeping security lines, boarding areas and jetliners moving – from the U.S. transportation secretary and airline chiefs on down the line – swear they’re prepared for the crowds.

But a strike by service workers in Charlotte Douglas International Airport threatens a hub in the Carolinas.

Airline passengers might get lucky like they did last year, when relatively few flights were canceled during the holiday week. A repeat will require the weather’s cooperation. And even if skies are blue, a shortage of air traffic controllers could create delays.

But another round of wintry weather could complicate travel leading up to Thanksgiving, according to forecasts across the U.S., while California and Washington state continue to recover from storm damage and power outages. 

Auto club and insurance company AAA predicts that nearly 80 million Americans will venture at least 50 miles from home between Tuesday and next Monday. Most will travel by car.

Drivers should get a slight break on gas prices. The nationwide average price for gasoline was $3.06 a gallon on Sunday, down from $3.27 at this time last year.

The Transportation Security Administration expects to screen 18.3 million people at U.S. airports during the same seven-day stretch. That would be 6% more than during the corresponding days last year but fit a pattern set throughout 2024.

“This will be the busiest Thanksgiving ever in terms of air travel,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said. “Fortunately, our staffing is also at the highest levels that they have ever been. We are ready.”

Pekoske said TSA will have enough screeners to keep general security lines under 30 minutes and lines for people who pay extra for PreCheck under 10 minutes.

Service workers at Charlotte Douglas International Airport walked off the job to protest what they call unlivable wages.

Charlotte Douglas International Airport officials have said this holiday travel season is expected to be the busiest on record, with an estimated 1.02 million passengers departing the airport between last Thursday and the Monday after Thanksgiving.

And an ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers could cause flight delays.

Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Mike Whitaker said last week that he expects his agency to use special measures to deal with shortages at some facilities. In the past, that has included airports in New York City and Florida.

“If we are short on staff, we will slow traffic as needed to keep the system safe,” Whitaker said.

The FAA has long struggled with a shortage of controllers that airline officials expect will last for years, despite the agency’s lofty hiring goals.

Thanksgiving Day takes place late this year, with the fourth Thursday of November falling on Nov. 28. That shortens the traditional shopping season and changes the rhythm of holiday travel.

With more time before the holiday, people tend to spread out their outbound travel over more days, but everyone returns at the same time, said Andrew Watterson, the chief operating officer of Southwest Airlines.

“A late Thanksgiving leads to a big crush at the end – the Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday after Thanksgiving are usually very busy with Thanksgiving this late,” Watterson said.

Airlines did a relatively good job of handling holiday crowds last year, when the weather was mild in most of the country. Fewer than 400 U.S. flights were canceled during Thanksgiving week in 2023 – about one of every 450 flights. So far in 2024, airlines have canceled about 1.3% of all flights.

The rise of remote work also has caused the Thanksgiving travel period to expand, AAA spokesperson Aixa Diaz said.

“The pandemic changed everything,” she said. “What we have seen is that post-pandemic, people are leaving at certain times, perhaps even leaving the weekend before Thanksgiving, working remotely from their destination a couple of days, and then enjoying time with their loved ones.”

Nightmares of Thanksgivings past have further shaped holiday traffic jams. Motorists who learned to avoid traveling the day before and the Sunday after Thanksgiving have created new bottlenecks on other days, according to Diaz.

“Because we warned for so long (that) Wednesday and Sunday are the worst days to travel, people were like, ‘OK, I’m going to leave on Tuesday and come back on Monday to avoid the rush,'” she said. “So now those two days are congested, as well.”

Airport security officials are pleading with passengers to arrive early, not to put lithium-ion batteries in checked bags in case they overheat, and to keep guns out of carry-on bags. TSA has discovered more than 6,000 guns at checkpoints this year, and most of them were loaded.

Holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas bring out many infrequent travelers, and they often have questions about what they can bring on planes.

TSA has a list on its website of items that are banned or restricted.

Drivers should know that Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons will be the worst times to travel by car, but it should be smooth sailing on freeways come Thanksgiving Day, according to transportation analytics company INRIX.

On the return home, the best travel times for motorists are before 1 p.m. on Sunday and before 8 a.m. or after 7 p.m. on Monday, the company said.

In metropolitan areas like Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and Washington, “traffic is expected to be more than double what it typically is on a normal day,” INRIX transportation analyst Bob Pishue said.