Sybille Bedford (1911–2006)
Author of A Legacy
About the Author
Series
Works by Sybille Bedford
Bedford, Sybille Archive 1 copy
Associated Works
The World of Law, Volumes I-II: The Law in Literature, The Law as Literature (1960) — Contributor — 54 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Bedford, Sybille
- Other names
- von Schoenebeck, Sybille Aleid Elsa (nee)
- Birthdate
- 1911-03-16
- Date of death
- 2006-02-17
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- journalist
novelist
aristocrat - Awards and honors
- Royal Society of Literature (Companion of Literature, 1994)
Golden PEN Award (1993)
Order of the British Empire (Officer ∙ 1981) - Relationships
- Huxley, Aldous (friend)
- Short biography
- Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck was born in the Charlottenberg district of Berlin, the daughter of a German aristocrat and his German-Jewish wife (later an Italian princess). On her father's death when she was seven years old, Sybille moved with her mother to Rome, London, and the south of France. She began a lifelong friendship with Aldous Huxley, who encouraged her to begin writing at age 16. In 1935, she made a brief marriage of convenience to Walter Bedford, an English army officer, which gave her British citizenship. During World War II, she went to the USA, but later returned to London and to her frequent European travels. Sybille Bedford's second novel, A Legacy (1956), is often considered her masterpiece. Her other books included three semi-autobiographical novels, A Favourite of the Gods (1963), A Compass Error (1968) and Jigsaw (1989), and several travel books. Working as a legal journalist for many years, she covered about 100 trials. In her book As It Was (1990), she discussed travel, the prosecution of D.H. Lawrence for Lady Chatterley's Lover, Jack Ruby's trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, and the trial of the Auschwitz officials in 1964. Although shy, Sybille Bedford could tell funny stories about her friends and fellow writers, including Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Edith Wharton, and the Huxleys. Her memoir, Quicksands, published in 2005 when she was nearly 94, revived interest in her elegant, insightful work. Her honors included OBE 1981; FRSL 1964; CLit 1994.
- Nationality
- Germany
UK - Birthplace
- Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany
- Places of residence
- Berlin, Germany
Sanary-sur-Mer, France
Chelsea, London, England, UK
Rome, Italy
Portugal
California, USA (show all 7)
Schloss Feldkirch, Baden, Germany - Place of death
- London, England, UK
Members
Reviews
Another one from the 1989 Booker shortlist, this lightly fictionalised autobiographical novel was my first experience of reading Bedford and a very enjoyable read.
The book describes her unconventional childhood between the wars. The story starts in Germany - when her parents divorced she lived with her father in a Schloss near the French and Swiss borders - her father was a connoisseur and collector - slightly impoverished but reluctant to sell his prized possessions.
When her father died she show more joined her mother, initially in Italy, where she was starting a relationship with the much younger Alessandro that led to an unlikely marriage. The young Sybille was a ward of a German court and as part of an agreement with her trustees it was decided that she would be educated in England, where the friends entrusted with finding a school decided to educate her themselves.
Her mother and her young husband fled Mussolini's Italy and settled in the village of Sanary-sur-Mer on the South coast of France, and the rest of Sybille's childhood was spent alternating between Sanary and London.
The story is evocative and full of intriguing details and joie de vivre - she mixed with some interesting people including Aldous Huxley who also settled in Sanary. Others appear pseudonymously to protect their reputations. The dominant character remains her mother whose descent into drug addiction is described in the final part of the story. show less
The book describes her unconventional childhood between the wars. The story starts in Germany - when her parents divorced she lived with her father in a Schloss near the French and Swiss borders - her father was a connoisseur and collector - slightly impoverished but reluctant to sell his prized possessions.
When her father died she show more joined her mother, initially in Italy, where she was starting a relationship with the much younger Alessandro that led to an unlikely marriage. The young Sybille was a ward of a German court and as part of an agreement with her trustees it was decided that she would be educated in England, where the friends entrusted with finding a school decided to educate her themselves.
Her mother and her young husband fled Mussolini's Italy and settled in the village of Sanary-sur-Mer on the South coast of France, and the rest of Sybille's childhood was spent alternating between Sanary and London.
The story is evocative and full of intriguing details and joie de vivre - she mixed with some interesting people including Aldous Huxley who also settled in Sanary. Others appear pseudonymously to protect their reputations. The dominant character remains her mother whose descent into drug addiction is described in the final part of the story. show less
Sybille Bedford's well-told, intimate memoir Jigsaw (1989) unfolds her fraught relationship with her wayward mother, who abandoned her as a child and took her up again more-or-less when Sybille, aka Baroness Billi, was a teenager. Between the two world wars, Sybille's adventures in Italy and the south of France with her mother, stepfather, and neighbors who became surrogate parents of sorts include Aldous & Maria Huxley and a couple who seemed to have glided from a painting by Tamara show more Lempicka. Sent to London in quest of education, Sybille lives first among a moveable household of hard-up bohemians and then more or less with a pair of literary sisters from Berlin who have melodramas of their own. Jigsaw is best read after Bedford's masterpiece, A Legacy (1956), which recounts the florid history of her father's family. Jigsaw is less forthcoming about Bedford's maternal ancestry though the portrait of a writer-manqué mother who became a morphine addict is vividly conveyed by physical descriptions and dialogue. show less
A Legacy was Sybille Bedford’s first novel, and like the rest of her fiction is very autobiographical. Based upon Bedford’s own upbringing in Germany, it is the story of two large and complex families united by a brief marriage. This is an extraordinary novel- charting these intertwined lives from around the time of the Franco-Prussian War to just before the First World War. The story is narrated by Francesca the youngest daughter of Baron Julius von Felden by his second wife, although show more most of the story takes place many years before her birth, and even before her parents meet.
“I spent the first nine years of my life in Germany, bundled to and fro between twohouses. One was outrageously large and ugly; the other was beautiful. They were a huge Wilhelminian town house in the old West of Berlin, built and inhabited by the parents of my father’s first wife, and a small seventeenth-century chateau and park in the South, near Vosges, bought for my father by my mother.”
Upon the marriage of Julius Von Felden and his first wife Melanie Merz the fortunes of two very different families become linked. The aristocratic, Catholic Von Felden’s from rural Baden, who in the mid 1800’s were still French speaking, and the Merzs a wealthy, bourgeois (non-practising) Jewish family from Berlin. Bedford recounts numerous family trials and tribulations in her fictionalised account of German life that quite obviously bears a striking resemblance to her own. In A Legacy Sybille Bedford shows us a world we don’t often see, a world now totally lost to us. It is a world of brutal military academies, the Kaiser’s Germany, backwoodsmen, eccentric landed gentry, gamblers, money and legacies.
The cast of characters is fairly large, Julius one of a large family of brothers, the most memorable of these Johannes is sent by his father to a brutal military cadet school. His experiences here totally destroy him, his flight being the beginning of a long political and diplomatic tussle that involves the family of his sister’s fiancé – and is still being felt many years later when our narrator herself is a young girl. Amid the darker aspects to the stories of these families, Sybille Bedford scatters some truly joyously humorous moments, we see an eccentric younger Julius travelling Europe in the company of three chimpanzees at the time he meets his first wife – booking himself and them into smart Berlin hotels – and needing to pay the price of the repairs which naturally must follow. To say that Julius and his chimps are something of a shock to his prospective in-laws, is an understatement. Poor Melanie… when informed she must be baptised before she marries the Catholic Julius (to her family’s horror) she takes herself off to church without telling anyone – later proudly producing her certificate of baptism – from a protestant church!
“In the morning Edu went to the hotel to fetch Julius. The boy had not arrived. Julius explained that he could not go out.
“The servants here do not seem to be kind.”
Edu inquired what he was to tell his parents. Julius said “You see, it is only because of Robert. Robert has a difficult nature. He is his own worst enemy.”
The boy remained lost for several days. Edu and Friedrich did the telegraphing. Grandpapa was persuaded to call at the Kaiserhof. Julius had wangled an anthracite stove, the management having refused to re-light the central plant. Julius himself suffered, but Grandpapa found it as warm as his own house. The chimpanzees too, comfortable for the first time, were in an amiable mood; Robert poured Madeira, and Tzara showed an interest in the old gentleman. He gave her a gold-piece, and went home impressed.
“As good as the Opera,” he described at luncheon. “The Opera in the old days.”
Following Melanie’s early death Julius remains very much at the heart of his in-laws family. His sister-in-law Sarah, a wealthy woman in her own right who has for years refused to pay her husband’s gambling debts – becomes perhaps his greatest friend. I have to admit to particularly liking Sarah – her toughness and straight talking, her friendship with Julius I really liked. It is through Sarah that Julius meets Caroline, thirty years his junior, who becomes his second wife, the mother of our narrator. Caroline’s story is continued in the sequel to this novel, Jigsaw: an Unsentimental education.
The writing is glorious, unsurprising to me, having already read A Favourite of the gods and A Compass Error, which introduced me to Bedford’s fabulous prose, her dialogue is superb, the interplay between characters feels very authentic. Once or twice the dialogue is a little hard to follow, but overall it’s really exceptional, giving voice to the society in which the author herself grew up. (There is one conversation that takes place on the final page, frustratingly- which I was a little confused about – so if there is anyone who has read the book who can remind me of the significance of the Spanish letters Caroline refers to, I would be very grateful.) Don’t let that put you off – true, this is the kind of book the reader needs to concentrate on, it is probably not an easy read –but even admitting one or two mild confusions I really loved it. Nancy Mitford apparently called A Legacy ‘One of the very best novels I have ever read’ while Francis King called it ‘One of the great books of the twentieth Century.’ Thankfully I have the sequel to this novel Jigsaw: an Unsentimental Education waiting on my bookcase, I can’t wait to read it. show less
“I spent the first nine years of my life in Germany, bundled to and fro between twohouses. One was outrageously large and ugly; the other was beautiful. They were a huge Wilhelminian town house in the old West of Berlin, built and inhabited by the parents of my father’s first wife, and a small seventeenth-century chateau and park in the South, near Vosges, bought for my father by my mother.”
Upon the marriage of Julius Von Felden and his first wife Melanie Merz the fortunes of two very different families become linked. The aristocratic, Catholic Von Felden’s from rural Baden, who in the mid 1800’s were still French speaking, and the Merzs a wealthy, bourgeois (non-practising) Jewish family from Berlin. Bedford recounts numerous family trials and tribulations in her fictionalised account of German life that quite obviously bears a striking resemblance to her own. In A Legacy Sybille Bedford shows us a world we don’t often see, a world now totally lost to us. It is a world of brutal military academies, the Kaiser’s Germany, backwoodsmen, eccentric landed gentry, gamblers, money and legacies.
The cast of characters is fairly large, Julius one of a large family of brothers, the most memorable of these Johannes is sent by his father to a brutal military cadet school. His experiences here totally destroy him, his flight being the beginning of a long political and diplomatic tussle that involves the family of his sister’s fiancé – and is still being felt many years later when our narrator herself is a young girl. Amid the darker aspects to the stories of these families, Sybille Bedford scatters some truly joyously humorous moments, we see an eccentric younger Julius travelling Europe in the company of three chimpanzees at the time he meets his first wife – booking himself and them into smart Berlin hotels – and needing to pay the price of the repairs which naturally must follow. To say that Julius and his chimps are something of a shock to his prospective in-laws, is an understatement. Poor Melanie… when informed she must be baptised before she marries the Catholic Julius (to her family’s horror) she takes herself off to church without telling anyone – later proudly producing her certificate of baptism – from a protestant church!
“In the morning Edu went to the hotel to fetch Julius. The boy had not arrived. Julius explained that he could not go out.
“The servants here do not seem to be kind.”
Edu inquired what he was to tell his parents. Julius said “You see, it is only because of Robert. Robert has a difficult nature. He is his own worst enemy.”
The boy remained lost for several days. Edu and Friedrich did the telegraphing. Grandpapa was persuaded to call at the Kaiserhof. Julius had wangled an anthracite stove, the management having refused to re-light the central plant. Julius himself suffered, but Grandpapa found it as warm as his own house. The chimpanzees too, comfortable for the first time, were in an amiable mood; Robert poured Madeira, and Tzara showed an interest in the old gentleman. He gave her a gold-piece, and went home impressed.
“As good as the Opera,” he described at luncheon. “The Opera in the old days.”
Following Melanie’s early death Julius remains very much at the heart of his in-laws family. His sister-in-law Sarah, a wealthy woman in her own right who has for years refused to pay her husband’s gambling debts – becomes perhaps his greatest friend. I have to admit to particularly liking Sarah – her toughness and straight talking, her friendship with Julius I really liked. It is through Sarah that Julius meets Caroline, thirty years his junior, who becomes his second wife, the mother of our narrator. Caroline’s story is continued in the sequel to this novel, Jigsaw: an Unsentimental education.
The writing is glorious, unsurprising to me, having already read A Favourite of the gods and A Compass Error, which introduced me to Bedford’s fabulous prose, her dialogue is superb, the interplay between characters feels very authentic. Once or twice the dialogue is a little hard to follow, but overall it’s really exceptional, giving voice to the society in which the author herself grew up. (There is one conversation that takes place on the final page, frustratingly- which I was a little confused about – so if there is anyone who has read the book who can remind me of the significance of the Spanish letters Caroline refers to, I would be very grateful.) Don’t let that put you off – true, this is the kind of book the reader needs to concentrate on, it is probably not an easy read –but even admitting one or two mild confusions I really loved it. Nancy Mitford apparently called A Legacy ‘One of the very best novels I have ever read’ while Francis King called it ‘One of the great books of the twentieth Century.’ Thankfully I have the sequel to this novel Jigsaw: an Unsentimental Education waiting on my bookcase, I can’t wait to read it. show less
This novel—set in Rome, London, and (to a lesser extent) the south of France, mostly in the first part of the twentieth century—concerns Constanza, a beautiful free-spirited, sexually liberal woman. Born sometime in the 1890s, she’s the daughter of a New England heiress, Anna Howland, and Rico, an Italian prince. Constanza’s life isn’t exactly exotic, but it’s hardly conventional. It’s not an upbringing that most of Bedford’s readers would have personal experience of, and show more while not entirely in line with “the lives of the rich and famous”, it certainly borders on it, or is perhaps is a smaller Roman version.
Initially, I thought Bedford was interested in exploring some of the same themes as Henry James, specifically the clash of American romanticism and idealism with Old World realism and pragmatism. Constanza’s mother’s fortune was likely a large part of her appeal to Prince Rico, whose family fortune was in decline and grand palazzo in Rome in some disrepair. Bedford does examine cultural difference to some extent, but her real focus is on marital infidelity.
Rico, it turns out, has a very long-standing extramarital relationship with Giulia, the wife of a marchese. Anna finds out, is wounded, enraged, and repulsed. She leaves her young son Giorgio behind and flees with her daughter to London. (She can do this because her money has all been protected by her American solicitors.) Rico, his aristocratic family, and their extensive social circle cannot understand Anna’s reaction, her prudishness, and dramatics. Friends side with him. Bedford would have us believe that infidelity is widespread and tolerated in Roman society. Even teenage Constanza, who follows in her father’s footsteps and is sexually precocious, is aware of her father’s liaison with Giulia. She thinks nothing of it, and can’t believe that this would be the reason her mother has taken her away and barred her from seeing her father. Anna refuses to clarify the nature of her husband’s crime, and for a time Constanza thinks his offence must be a financial one.
The large central section of the novel focuses on Anna and Constanza’s life in London. Anna nurses a depression while Constanza sows her wild oats in the manner typical of a young man, restlessly entering and exiting many sexual relationships. And so it goes until she makes the acquaintance of Simon Herbert, a loquacious and entertaining young man. His presence brings joy into the life of the apathetic, defeated Anna. It’s at this point—in my opinion, at least—that Bedford’s novel goes off the rails and turns into a semi-ridiculous soap opera. Constanza acts in a way that is inconsistent with her free-spirited, independent, and mostly selfish orientation. To please her mother, she agrees to marry Simon, though he’s not her type and she’s not in love with him. His awareness of her lack of feeling for him eventually erodes the marriage. Both end up having affairs. I found the whole thing implausible and silly.
I enjoyed aspects of Bedford’s novel, but feel that it missed the mark overall. Characterization is not strong. I believe I was at some disadvantage reading this, as I know almost nothing about Italian history, culture, and politics—all of which figure in the book. There’s lots of Italian language content, not all of which I could guess the meaning of by using context clues alone. I sought online translation. I found Bedford’s style a little odd. I wasn’t confident I was making the correct inferences when I read dialogue between characters. For example, when Rico’s infidelity comes out, he pronounces that Anna “cannot have it both ways.” Can’t have what both ways? Here, and elsewhere, it wasn’t clear to me what the character was actually referring to. Possibly it was that she could not deny him a mistress when she was not interested in a sexual relationship with him.
Initially an interesting novel and engaging enough to complete, A Favourite of the Gods ultimately did not fully deliver for me. It is, in my view, a lesser novel. show less
Initially, I thought Bedford was interested in exploring some of the same themes as Henry James, specifically the clash of American romanticism and idealism with Old World realism and pragmatism. Constanza’s mother’s fortune was likely a large part of her appeal to Prince Rico, whose family fortune was in decline and grand palazzo in Rome in some disrepair. Bedford does examine cultural difference to some extent, but her real focus is on marital infidelity.
Rico, it turns out, has a very long-standing extramarital relationship with Giulia, the wife of a marchese. Anna finds out, is wounded, enraged, and repulsed. She leaves her young son Giorgio behind and flees with her daughter to London. (She can do this because her money has all been protected by her American solicitors.) Rico, his aristocratic family, and their extensive social circle cannot understand Anna’s reaction, her prudishness, and dramatics. Friends side with him. Bedford would have us believe that infidelity is widespread and tolerated in Roman society. Even teenage Constanza, who follows in her father’s footsteps and is sexually precocious, is aware of her father’s liaison with Giulia. She thinks nothing of it, and can’t believe that this would be the reason her mother has taken her away and barred her from seeing her father. Anna refuses to clarify the nature of her husband’s crime, and for a time Constanza thinks his offence must be a financial one.
The large central section of the novel focuses on Anna and Constanza’s life in London. Anna nurses a depression while Constanza sows her wild oats in the manner typical of a young man, restlessly entering and exiting many sexual relationships. And so it goes until she makes the acquaintance of Simon Herbert, a loquacious and entertaining young man. His presence brings joy into the life of the apathetic, defeated Anna. It’s at this point—in my opinion, at least—that Bedford’s novel goes off the rails and turns into a semi-ridiculous soap opera. Constanza acts in a way that is inconsistent with her free-spirited, independent, and mostly selfish orientation.
I enjoyed aspects of Bedford’s novel, but feel that it missed the mark overall. Characterization is not strong. I believe I was at some disadvantage reading this, as I know almost nothing about Italian history, culture, and politics—all of which figure in the book. There’s lots of Italian language content, not all of which I could guess the meaning of by using context clues alone. I sought online translation. I found Bedford’s style a little odd. I wasn’t confident I was making the correct inferences when I read dialogue between characters. For example, when Rico’s infidelity comes out, he pronounces that Anna “cannot have it both ways.” Can’t have what both ways? Here, and elsewhere, it wasn’t clear to me what the character was actually referring to. Possibly it was that she could not deny him a mistress when she was not interested in a sexual relationship with him.
Initially an interesting novel and engaging enough to complete, A Favourite of the Gods ultimately did not fully deliver for me. It is, in my view, a lesser novel. show less
Lists
Booker Prize (1)
Female Author (1)
Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 16
- Also by
- 3
- Members
- 2,890
- Popularity
- #8,868
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 40
- ISBNs
- 127
- Languages
- 7
- Favorited
- 9
