This lengthy book was quite intimidating to me but I instantly fell in love with Emma Harte.
I immediately fell in love with her personality and strength and basked in her wealth.
I enjoyed reading about her trials, tribulations, and how she came out on top from nowhere.
This one got me addicted to family sagas and defeated my fear of the size of the novel.

I absolutely loved this. I had been meaning to read it for a while now and I am so glad I did.
Barbara’s description of the era was impeccable and I truly could visualise a young Emma working in the Moors. Her story is too inspirational to not be true and I truly wish I was Emma.
I love her character and how she grew as the years went on, bold, poised and not immune to her own shortcomings. She was the OG girlboss in a way. Can’t wait to read the rest of the saga!!

This was an interesting story but too slow for me. I am going to set it aside for now....

My all-time favorite book/story.

I will re-read and re-read this book time and again.

The beginning of a large saga, this book captures the hearts of anyone who loves a great story and one with a young girl named Emma who has a "Plan with a capital P." Emma stays true to her plan and in the meantime we are learning all about her and her circumstances as a young child in poverty. Emma's strength and willpower is inspiring.

Anyone who has a dream of their own will enjoy reading about a young woman who develops into a Woman of Substance indeed in which she creates her own fashion empire. The following books in the same series follow Emma and her posterity into the world of money and lots of it. How money and power have an effect on those left behind and those whom did not work for it lack the appreciation thereof.

An enriching and sweet story, the first of the series of which is my favorite of them all.

I have definitely read this book but remember only bits and pieces of the story maybe because I skipped some parts of the book to get to the end of it, not because it was bad but because the book was very long for the teenage me to complete properly. Giving it a 3* for the bits I remember reading and who knows might give it a go again.

This book is a hula hoop. It is crowding frat boys into phone booths, it is savory jello salads with miracle whip. In short, it was a runaway success and completely of its time. It doesn't translate well for readers in a different era.

I've not ever read this before but I've often heard it spoken of and referred to. When it was a Kindle Unlimited selection I figured the price was right. Sadly, I'm just not fitted for this book. It is written in the style popular during the 50s, 60s and 70s--lots of infodumps, lots of words, lots of telling.

After a very lengthy intro from the author about how famous the book is and how much she, the author, single-handedly revolutionized fiction (name-dropping the film stars from her book's adaptation all the while) the story itself starts. We are immediately on a plane streaking through a "vaporous haze of cumulus clouds". That's the wordy style popular in mid-century modern literature, Nevermind that clouds are a vaporous haze and so the extra words are there in the same way there is flocking on wallpaper...because at the time the style was popular because it _seems fancy_. We are introduced to this Woman Of Substance as she exposits to her heir apparent and ponders the inner workings of her empire.

The character is not appealing to me; perhaps if Id first met her as the poor urchin she was in the beginning I might have an empathy for her story. Instead I met a hardened old woman who hates most of her children and pins her hope (and scenery chewing lecture) on a granddaughter who isn't quite so eager to alienate the world in pursuit of cash.

I know that in the world of Bobbsey Twins and Peyton Plage this savvy businesswoman was probably revolutionary for fiction. Now she's as tired as Alexis Carrington, Gordon Gekko and every other grasping relic of the 20th Century's money-mad ways.

I skimmed a bit and skimmed a bit more. But this book just isn't for me. I've spent more time on this review than I had expected to, simply because it spurred me on to ponder just how much fiction has changed--for better and worse--and just how much the popularity of the book is owing to the times it was released as opposed to any true power of the story itself or the way that story was told.

I got over 1/3 through (over 300 pages) and decided this isn't a book for me. However, I wanted to know what happened, so I skimmed the rest. So I'm still counting it as a book read

Emma Harte rises from a housemaid in Yorkshire to one of the wealthiest people in the world.

This book is a tour de force, a sweeping narrative with a memorable heroine. I really enjoyed reading about Emma’s rise through the ranks of society. The characters are lively and vivid, even the supporting ones.

Of course it’s not perfect. The romances are all underdeveloped, which is a cause for concern because a few of them propel the plot. But Emma is such an indomitable character that sweeps the story along anyway.

ΕΚΠΛΗΚΤΙΚΟ!!!! ΦΑΝΤΑΣΤΙΚΟ!!!!! Η ιστορία της Έμα Χάρτ μου άρεσε υπερβολικά!!!! Τι ωραία ιστορία!!!! Από σήμερα στα πολύ αγαπημένα μου βιβλία!!!!

Oh, how I love these long, sweeping family epics. I was caught up in the dramatic life of Emma Harte, her loves, and her children. I can't wait to read more.

36 pages of insufferably bad writing was enough to convince me that I would not make it through 910 pages of it. Everything described in such minute detail, with adverbs piled on adjectives piled on multiple subordinate clauses in every sentence. Everything told; nothing shown. It's maddening. A few reviews seem to suggest that it gets at least marginally better after the first section, but I just can't do it. I also gather that the story itself is half decent, so maybe if someone makes a mini-series or something, I'll watch it. But I cannot slog through this atrociously overwrought mess.

Fans of historical fiction will enjoy this novel. It is set in England from the early 1900's to 1968. The book was published in the 70's and was one of the world's top bestsellers, translated into many languages. The reader follows the heroine, Emma Harte, as she goes through life's peaks and troughs. We are inspired by her determination to succeed, her beauty and her business-savviness. Curling up with this book on a rainy day, being transported into a bygone era and a world in which the protagonist rises from poverty to wealth, and from being downtrodden to triumphant, but not without some price to pay during any of those stages, the portrayal of the protagonist in this sweeping novel also offers parallel glimpses into different bits and pieces of our own lives as well.