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Exploring one of the world’s most successful writers through the looking glass of her fiction is an idea particularly well suited in the case of Barbara Taylor Bradford, whose fictional heroines draw on their creator’s character and chart the emotional contours of her own experience, and whose own history so often emerges from the shadowland between fact and fiction.

She turned out to be unstintingly generous with her time, advising me about real-life places, episodes and events in the novels, despite a hectic round of her own, which included the writing of two novels, the launch of her nineteenth novel, Emma’s Secret (2003), a high-profile legal action in India against a TV film company suspected of purloining her books and films, a grand party celebrating a quarter of a century with publishers HarperCollins, and a schedule of charity events, which film producer, business manager and husband Robert Bradford arranged for her – oh, and a week or so’s holiday.

Barbara’s first novel, A Woman of Substance, is, according to Publishers Weekly, the eighth biggest-selling novel ever to be published. It has sold more than twenty-five million copies worldwide. In it, so reviewers will tell you, we have the classic Cinderella story. Emma Harte rises from maid to matriarch; the impoverished Edwardian kitchen maid comes, through her own efforts, to rule over a business empire that stretches from Yorkshire to America and Australia.

What it took to escape the constraints of the Edwardian and later twentieth-century English class system is at the heart of Barbara’s family’s own story too. Her rise to bestselling novelist and icon for emancipated womanhood, currently valued at some $170 million, from a two-up two-down in Leeds is by any standard extraordinary. Her elevation coincided with the post-war drift from an Edwardian upstairs/downstairs class system (into which Barbara’s mother Freda was born), reconstructed by socialism in the period of Barbara’s own childhood, to one ultimately sensible to merit, a transformation which finds symbolic incidence in the year 1979, in which A Woman of Substance was first published and that champion of meritocracy, Margaret Thatcher, who had risen from the lower middle classes to become Britain’s first female Prime Minister, arrived at No. 10 Downing Street.

Barbara’s novels, which encourage women to believe they can conquer the world, whatever their class or background and despite the fact that they are operating in a man’s domain, tapped into the aspirational energy of this era and served to expedite social change. Indeed, it might be said that Barbara Taylor Bradford would have invented Margaret Thatcher if she had not already existed. When they met, there was a memorable double take of where ambition had led them. ‘I was invited to a reception at Number Ten,’ Barbara recalls. ‘I saw a picture of Churchill in the hall outside the reception room and slipped out to look at it. Mrs Thatcher followed me out and asked if I was all right. I just said: “I never thought a girl from Yorkshire like me would be standing here at the invitation of the Prime Minister looking at a portrait of Churchill inside ten Downing Street,” and she whispered: “I know what you mean.”’

More intriguingly, in the process of writing fiction, ideas arise which owe their genesis not to the culture of an era, but to the author’s inner experience, and here, as any editor knows, lie the most compelling parts of a writer’s work. Barbara is the first to agree: ‘It’s very hard when you’ve just finished a novel to define what you’ve really written about other than what seems to be the verity on paper. There’s something else there underlying it subconsciously in the writer’s mind, and that I might be able to give you later.’ She promised this to journalist Billie Figg in the early 1980s, but never delivered, though the prospect is especially enticing, given that she can also say: ‘My typewriter is my psychiatrist.’

There is no pearl without first there being grit in the oyster. The grit may lie in childhood experience, possibly only partly understood or deliberately blanked out, buried and unresolved by the defence mechanisms of the conscious mind. Unawares, the subconscious generates the ideas that claw at a writer’s inner self and drive his or her best fiction.

Barbara shies away from such talk, denouncing inspiration – it is, she says, something that she has never ‘had’. She admits that on occasion she finds herself strangely moved by a place and gets feelings of déjà vu, even of having been part of something that happened before she was born, but mostly she sees herself as a storyteller, a creator of stories, happy to draw on her own life, all of it perfectly conscious and practical. Later we will see how she works up a novel out of her characters, which is indeed a conscious process. But subconscious influences are by their very nature not known to the conscious mind, and we will also see that echoes of a past unknown do indeed inhabit her writing.

Barbara will tell you that it was her mother, Freda, who made her who she is today. Mother and daughter were so close, and Freda so determined an influence, that their relationship reads almost like a conspiracy in Barbara’s future success. Freda was on a mission, ‘a crusade’, but it wasn’t quite the selfless mission that Barbara supposed, for Freda had an agenda: she was driven to realise ambition in her daughter by a need to resolve the disastrous experiences of her own childhood, about which Barbara, and possibly even Freda’s husband, knew nothing.

In fact, Barbara’s story turns out to be an inextricable part of the story of not two but three women – herself, her mother Freda, and Freda’s mother, Edith, whose own dream of rising in the world turned horribly sour when the man she loved failed her and reduced her family to penury. It left her eldest daughter Freda with enormous problems to resolve, and a sense of loss which, on account of her extraordinarily close relationship with Barbara, found its way into the novels. One might even say that in resolving it in the lives of her characters Barbara appeased Freda and, in her material success, actually realised Edith’s dream.

Barbara told me very little about her mother and grandmother before I began writing this book, and as my own research progressed I had to assume that she did not know their incredible story. If she had known, surely she would have told me. If she had not wanted me to know, why set me loose on research geared to finding out? At the end, when I showed her the manuscript, her shock confirmed that she had not known, and she found it very difficult to accept that she had written about these things of which she had no conscious knowledge.

That the novels own something of which their creator is not master, to my mind adds to their magic, the subconscious process signifying Freda’s power over Barbara, which Barbara would not deny. She may not have been aware of all that happened to Freda, but she was ‘joined at the hip’, as she put it, to one who was aware.

No one was closer to Barbara at the most impressionable moments of her life than Freda. They were inseparable, and the child’s subconscious could not have failed to imbibe a sense of what assailed her mother. Even if Freda withheld the detail, or Barbara blanked it out, the adult Barbara allows an impression of ‘a great sense of loss’ in Freda, which is indeed the very feeling that so many of her fictional characters must overcome.

Freda’s legacy of deprivation – her loss – became the grit around which the pearls of Barbara’s success were layered. So closely woven were the threads of these three women’s lives that Barbara’s part in the plot – the end game, the novels – seems in a real sense predestined. In reality, everything in Freda’s history, and that of Edith’s, required Barbara to happen. In the garden of her fiction, they are one seed. None is strictly one character or another, although Barbara regards Freda as most closely Audra Kenton in Act of Will. Nevertheless, their preoccupations are what the novels are about.

Of secrets, she writes in Everything to Gain, ‘there were so many in our family . . . I never wanted to face those secrets from my childhood. Better to forget them; better still to pretend they did not exist. But they did. My childhood was constructed on secrets layered one on top of the other.’ In Her Own Rules, Meredith Stratton quantifies the challenge of the project: ‘For years she had lived with half-truths, had hidden so much, that it was difficult to unearth it all now.’

Secrets produce rumour, which challenges the literary detective to run down the truth at the heart of the most fantastic storylines. Known facts act like an adhesive for the calcium layers of fictional storyline which make up the ‘pearl’ that is the author’s work. These secrets empower Barbara’s best fiction. They find expression in the desire for revenge, which Edith will have felt and which drives Emma Harte’s rise in A Woman of Substance. They find expression in the unnatural force of Audra Kenton’s determination in Act of Will that her daughter Christina will live a better life than she, and in the driving ambition of dispossessed Maximilian West in The Women in His Life.

My project is not, therefore, as simple as matching Barbara’s character with the woman of substance she created in the novels, but I believe it takes us a lot closer to explaining why A Woman of Substance is the eighth biggest-selling novel in the history of the world than merely observing such a match or studying the marketing plan. That is not to belittle the marketing of this novel, which set new records in the industry; nor is it to underestimate the significance of the timing of the venture; nor to underrate the talents of the author in helping fashion Eighties’ Zeitgeist.

It is just that these ‘secrets’, which come to us across a gulf of one hundred years, have exerted an impressive power in the lives of these women, and although we live in a time when the market rules, deep down we still reserve our highest regard for works not planned for the market but which come from just such an elemental drive of the author, especially when, as in the case of A Woman of Substance, that drive finds so universal a significance among its readers in the most pressing business of our times – that of rising in the world.