Title: A woman of substance
First published: 1979
Description: Emma Harte Lowther Ainsley is seventy-eight years old and one of the richest most powerful women in the world. Self-reliant and ruthless, she uses money as a weapon and adversity as a tool. 
In her poverty-stricken youth, Emma exhibited an uncommon amount of initiative and intelligence even as a maidservant on a Yorkshire estate. Pregnant and unwed at fifteen, she fled her shameful situation to seek anonymity in a grimy manufacturing town. Here the cogs of machinery would become wheels of fortune for the enterprising young woman. Her business began as a small fixed shop of homemade treats and expanded into a major department store. At the age of twenty-five she was a successful businesswoman, and by fifty she was an international corporate power. 
Emma's ambition, sacrifice, and fearless optimism had built a financial empire deficient in only one commodity - personal happiness. Between ill-fated romances and discordant marriages she fought death, war, even her own children, plus the haunting memory of her first love. Only two men - one a friend, one a lover - would tear Emma's mind away from the all-absorbing business with which she tried to fill her empty heart. One would be a source of strength throughout her days, the other would produce the  most devastating crisis of her long life. 
A long and satisfying novel of money, power, and passion with contrasting glimpses of the start realities of poverty alongside the grandeur and opulence of the English gentry.
Subjects: Fiction, Businesswomen, Fiction in English, Family, Romance, Novela estadounidense, Mujeres de negocios, Literatura estadounidense, Families, Large type books, Young women, fiction, Fiction, family life, general, Harte, emma (fictitious character), fiction, Fiction, general, Fiction, romance, general
Places: United States