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    A Woman of Substance
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    A Woman of Substance
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    A Woman of Substance
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    A Woman of Substance

    Written by Barbara Taylor Bradford

    Narrated by Diana Quick

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    'Queen of the genre' Sunday Times

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 25, 2012
    ISBN9780007502189
    Author

    Barbara Taylor Bradford

    Barbara Taylor Bradford was born and raised in Leeds, and worked as a journalist in London. Her first novel, A Woman of Substance, is one of the bestelling novels of all time and Barbara’s books have sold more than 90 million copies worldwide. In 2007, Barbara was appointed an OBE by the Queen for her services to literature. Ten miniseries and television movies have been made of her books. She currently lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for A Woman of Substance

    4/5

    18 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 3/5
      Meh, Emma may be a woman of substance, but the book itself hasn't got much.
    • 5/5
      Love this book. Emma is one strong willed woman. Fights her way to top and does everything she can to stay there. I was easily pulled into her world and enjoyed being there through the good times and bad.
    • 3/5
      Yes, yes, yes, she's gritty, determined, beautiful, nobody's fool, etc etc. Does Ms Bradford have to keep repeating it. I get the picture.
    • 4/5
      It took me a little while to get into this book, some of the passages seem excessively wordy, but once I got into the story, I fell in love. Emma is such a strong, captivating character, you can't help but get wrapped up in her story.
    • 4/5
      A wonderful novel about the strength and dedication one woman has to pull herself out of poverty and the sacrifices she makes to survive and become powerful in a world and era dominated by men. It is also about the revenge that guides her throughout her life and how she comes to terms with it. It is also about destiny and how it always finds a way of coming through. My only negative and the only reason I didn't give it 5 stars, is its length. At a little over 900 pages you really have to love the story to want to see it through, which for me, I felt the author did a wonderful job of making that happen.
    • 5/5
      Outstanding--Holds the attention completely--Love Emma Hartebut boy did she ever have some enemies
    • 1/5
      I tried to like this book. I really did. I loved Jennifer Donnelly's The Tea Rose, and a friend recommended this one because it's also a family drama and historical fiction. But the main difference between these two novels is the quality of the writing—Barbara Taylor Bradford's writing style was annoying, frankly. Every description was excessive and flowery (the elegant clothes, rooms, furniture...), and the plot was incredibly predictable. I couldn't feel attached to any of the characters; the main one, Emma Harte, because she was so cold to everyone (and not in a good way like Scarlett O'Hara, who Bradford was clearly trying to channel), or anyone else, because I knew exactly what would happen to them (and which ones would die) as soon as they were introduced. Emma's great revenge scene was very anti-climactic, and her supposed "great" romance was a cheap imitation of Scarlett and Rhett (and with GWTW being my absolute favorite everything, that was particularly grating). I slogged through the whole thing because I figured things had to improve after the flowering beginning—and they did, mostly, during the middle when Emma moved away from Fairley Hall to begin making her fortune—but the ending was incredibly disappointing. But I couldn't not read the last 100 pages after reading the first 800! Save yourself the trouble and avoid this one.
    • 2/5
      I love historical fiction, and to my mind there aren't enough that focus on the drama of building a business, so the premise of this appealed to me. It's the rag to riches story of a British woman who went from lowly maid to powerful head of a business empire in the early 20th century when women weren't by and large able to rise to such heights. However, the writing style here was puerile romance aisle, and far too wretched to make me willing to stay with this for over 900 trade paperback pages. Within ten pages we have such cliched and purple writing as "implacable mouth" and eyes "cold as steel," (Emma Harte's, our heroine--they're green--classic Mary Sue color--as is those of her granddaughter protege--those are "violet.") and loads of adverb, adjective and simile prose pile-ups and dizzying point of view shifts. I guess there's something to be said for getting engrossed in a trashy book, but I knew dozens, let alone hundreds of pages of this would drive me insane.
    • 4/5
      Took awhile for me to get into it, so glad I kept reading. Love the Emma Harte books!