nicheopf.blogg.se

Goodness, I think, she’s going to read the whole thing. She looks up and says excitedly: “What a good beginning!” Then she goes back to it.

“I never thought of looking,” she says, flicking through the 800-plus pages, then she starts reading aloud. It occurs to Bradford, with the 40th anniversary edition of the book on the table in front of us, that the chapter might have made its way back in. But she took it out, and I was infuriated.” “We cut a lot.” Her then editor made her take out a whole chapter – the one that followed her character Blackie O’Neill through the first world war (he was a friend to the book’s heroine, the kitchen maid turned retail tycoon Emma Harte). It was 16 and a half pounds (7.5kg), she says, her eyes glittering. S o long was Barbara Taylor Bradford’s novel A Woman of Substance – the book that would launch her career and go on to sell 32m copies – that she measured it by weight, not number of pages.