Sybille Bedford

On the marriage of Julius von Felden and Melanie Merz, the fortunes of two families are somewhat fatally entwined. In A Legacy, Sybille Bedford depicts their vastly different worlds - the wealthy bourgeois life of the Merzes in Berlin and the aristocratic eccentricity of the von Felden dynasty in rural Baden. Portrayed with exquisite wit and acute observation, their personal upheavals and tragedies are set against the menacing backdrop of a newly unified Germany combined with Prussian militarism in the decades before the First World War.

A Legacy

The sequel to A Legacy continues the story of a young woman from the Kaiser's Germany to Europe in the 1920s and the vanished world of Europe between world wars as the narrator describes her discovery of the complexities, passions, wisdom, and mysteries of life, with the help of a diverse array of "teachers." Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

An Unsentimental Education : a Biographical Novel

Jigsaw

A Traveller's Tales from Europe

Pleasures and Landscapes

Described as "one of the most charming travel books ever written" ("The Atlantic Monthly"), this book is a singularly delightful portrait of Mexico. Map.

A Traveller's Tale from Mexico

A Visit to Don Otavio

Daniel Mendelsohn

Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

A Legacy is the tale of two very different families, the Merzes and the Feldens. The Jewish Merzes are longstanding members of Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie who count a friend of Goethe among their distinguished ancestors. Not that this proud legacy means much of anything to them anymore. Secure in their huge town house, they devote themselves to little more than enjoying their comforts and ensuring their wealth. The Feldens are landed aristocracy, well off but not rich, from Germany’s Catholic south. After Julius von Felden marries Melanie Merz the fortunes of the two families will be strangely, indeed fatally, entwined. Set during the run-up to World War I, a time of weirdly mingled complacency and angst, A Legacy is captivating, magnificently funny, and profound, an unforgettable image of a doomed way of life.

Favorite of the Gods

Sybille Bedford, an intimate friend of the Huxleys through four decades, re-creates not only the private Huxley and the literary Huxley but the entire intellectual and social era to which he was central. Drawing on his letters and diaries, the memories of his intimates, and her own sharp and sensitive comprehension of Huxley's writings, Mrs. Bedford has written a masterful biography. Huxley becomes a living, deeply attractive presence, while his great contemporaries flash through these pages in memorable and moving encounters.

A Biography

Aldous Huxley

Educazione non sentimentale

The sequel to A Favorite of the Gods, & Counterpoint's fourth Bedford reprint in a series of six.

A Novel

A Compass Error

Il retaggio

En el matrimonio de Julius von Felden y Melanie Merz se entrelazan los destinos de dos familias. Sybille Bedford describe en "El legado" las considerables diferencias de ambos universos: la cómoda vida burguesa de los Merz en Berlín y la excentricidad aristocrática de la dinastía Von Felden en el Baden rural. La autora traza con exquisito ingenio y agudeza las convulsiones y las tragedias de los personajes bajo el amenazador telón de fondo de la Alemania recién unificada y el militarismo prusiano en las décadas anteriores a la Primera Guerra Mundial.

El legado

A Biography. Volume One, 1894-1939

One autumn in the late 1920s, Constanza boards a train in Italy en route to Brussels and a new marriage. With her is her young daughter Flavia. Through an odd incident Constanza makes a casual decision that changes both their lives.

A Favourite of the Gods

'Going to law courts is a good education for a novelist. It provides you with the most extravagant material, and it teaches the near impossibility of reaching the truth.' Sybille Bedford, Paris Review (1993) For The Faces of Justice (1961) Sybille Bedford journeyed through Europe to sit in the press box of the courts of law - high courts, low courts, police courts. In England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, she watched the prisoners at the bar, the accusing community arrayed against them, the advocates, the jurors, the judges on the bench. She saw justice being attempted under the law - the best we can do, the worst we can do - varying in subtle yet astonishing ways from country to country. The result is a story about justice, humanity and the individual - moving, dramatic, superbly observed, splendidly told.

The Faces of Justice

A Favourite of the Gods is the story of two generations of a single family, united by a strong matrilineal bond but divided by the customs of their differing nationalities. Anna Howland, the matriarch and American heiress, born in the 1870s to a prominent, liberal New England family marries an Italian prince and makes her home in Rome; her daughter Constanza, the favorite of the title, inherits her mother’s beauty, intelligence, and wealth, along with her father’s Catholicism, which she soon rejects. When disaster strikes, Anna and the prince fall back on the standards of behavior of their disparate cultures; Constanza, with her European upbringing, is free to plot her own course, and she does so with daring, making an unconventional life for herself in England and on the continent during and after the First World War. Her own daughter Flavia is the heroine of A Compass Error, which begins where the first novel concludes. Flavia too is a brilliant young woman, though both more brash and more faltering than her mother, studying for her entrance exam to Oxford when she becomes involved with a mysterious woman whose arrival at a sensitive moment in Flavia’s adolescence will alter both her and her mother’s lives forever.

A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error

Pleasures, Landscapes and Justice

As it was

Aldous Huxley: 1894-1939

Showing how history imprints itself on private lives, this memoir presents the author's sensuous, harrowing, and remarkable life. It moves from Berlin during the Great War to the artists' set on the Cote d'Azur, through lovers, mentors, seducers and friends, and from genteel yet shabby poverty to comfort in London's Chelsea.

Sybille Bedford

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