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Sybille Bedford: A Life
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About This Book
The first biography of the universally acclaimed British writer, Sybille Bedford, by the celebrated author of books about Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. Passionate, liberated, fiercely independent, Sybille Bedford was a writer and a journalist, the author of ten books, including a biography of Aldous Huxley, and four novels, all of which fictionalized her extraordinary life. Born in Berlin, she grew up in Baden, first with her distant, aristocratic father, and then in France with her intellectual, narcissistic, morphine-addicted mother and her lover. She was a child with a German Jewish background who survived two world wars and went on to spend her adult life in exile in France, Italy, New York, and Los Angeles, before finally settling in England. Bedford was ahead of her time in many ways, with great enthusiasm for life and all its sensual pleasures, including friendships with bold faced names in the worlds of literature and food as well as a literary network of high-powered lesbians. Aldous Huxley became a mentor, and Martha Gellhorn encouraged her to write her first novel, A Legacy; in 1989, her novel Jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In the 1960s, she wrote for magazines and newspapers, covering nearly 100 trials, including those of Auschwitz officials accused of Nazi war crimes and Jack Ruby, on trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Brenda Wineapple has called Bedford one of the finest stylists of the 20th century, bar none. In this major biography, Selina Hastings has brilliantly captured the fierce intelligence, wit, curiosity, and compassion of the woman and the writer in all the richness of her character and achievements.
Reviews
"And now here we have it, elegantly related by Selina Hastings ..."
"From the 1950s she became a high-grade court reporter, writing several long-form essays about legal cases, including the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial and the Profumo affair."
"Selina Hastings has written a wonderful biography, with lashings of lesbian lovers, which provides a soundtrack to one version of the 20th century ..."
"I can't express how wonderful [Bedford's] novels are, or this biography, which brings a fundamentally shy and private woman out into the light and is populated by the sorts of people who don't seem to exist any more—madly clever, slightly louche, culturally omnivorous, sexually fluid, crisscrossing Europe and each other in search of fun and new ideas."
"Hastings is impeccable on the facts of Bedford's life—almost every meal and certainly every trip and romantic fling is exhaustively detailed—yet she refrains from passing much comment on Bedford's character, instead letting Bedford's personal writings, and the not always admiring correspondence from her many friends, paint a picture of a much loved, self centred, convivial bon vivant."
"All three of these domineering, self-centered writers regularly behaved monstrously to others, sometimes unforgivably so."
"Now that we have heard the whole of it, Bedford emerges as even more elusive than before; the books become less clear and harder to read emotionally."
"The supporting cast includes Martha Gellhorn, whose writing guidance proved important, and Richard Olney, the expatriate American who codified French cooking and wine."
"The litany of schlösser, villas and Wiltshire manor houses tips into Private Eye's 'What you didn't miss ."
"It's very difficult doing both at the same time.' ..."
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