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

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Bedford's autobiographical novel paints a vivid picture of life in 1920s Europe between the wars. Sybille Bedford placed the ambiguous and inescapable stuff of her own life at the center of her fiction, and in Jigsaw—her fourth and final novel, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize—she did it with particular artistry. “What I had in mind,” she was later to say, “was to build a novel out of the events and people who had made up, and marked, my early youth...Truth here was an artistic, not moral, requirement...It involved...writing about myself, my feelings, my actions.” And so she assembled the puzzle pieces of her singular past into a picture of her “unsentimental education.” We learn of a childhood spent alone with her father, “a stranded man of the world” living a life of “ungenteel poverty in quite grand surroundings,” a château, that is, deep in the German countryside, with wine but little else for him and his young daughter to hold body and soul together. We learn of her return to Italy and her mother, “the one character I wished to keep minor and knew all along that it could not be done,” and the dark secret consuming her mother’s life. Finally, she tells us how she lived with and learned from Aldous and Maria Huxley on the French Riviera, developing the sense of purpose and determination that made her the great writer she would become.

An Unsentimental Education

Jigsaw

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

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 brilliant picture of a rich, aristocratic Italian-American marriage and its consequences, down to the second generation.

A Favourite of the Gods

Regina V. Penguin Books, LTD [1960]

The Trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover

A Biography. Volume One, 1894-1939

In the mid-1940s, Sybille Bedford set off from Grand Central Station for Mexico, accompanied by her friend E., a hamper of food and drink (Virginia ham, cherries, watercress, a flute of bread, Portuguese rosé), books, a writing board, and paper. Her resulting travelogue captures the violent beauty of the country she visited. Bedford doesn’t so much describe Mexico as take the reader there—in second-class motor buses over thousands of miles, through arid noons and frigid nights, successions of comida corrida, botched excursions to the coast, conversations recorded verbatim, hilarious observations, and fascinating digressions into murky histories. At the heart of the book is the Don Otavio of the title, the travelers’ gracious host, his garrulous family and friends, and his Edenic hacienda at Lake Chapala. Published in 1953, A Visit to Don Otavio was an immediate success, “a travel book written by a novelist,” as Bedford described it, establishing her reputation as a nonpareil writer.

A Mexican Journey

Basta aprire questo libro per sentire subito che, anche in pieno Novecento, il romanzo familiare, con tutti i suoi apparati cigolanti di intrecci e vicissitudini, poteva raggiungere la felicità della perfezione – e di una specie così improbabile da suscitare nel lettore una preziosa e irragionevole euforia (un po’ come accadde, negli stessi anni Cinquanta, ai primi lettori del "Gattopardo"). A Sybille Bedford, di fatto, come agli archeologi più fortunati, è accaduto di partire alla ricerca di un mondo – e di ritrovarlo, oltre una certa porta, miracolosamente intatto. La porta che varchiamo nel "Retaggio" si apre su una scena ormai sorprendentemente esotica: la Germania di fine Ottocento, con la sua opulenza terriera e finanziaria, le aspre tensioni sociali, il presagio di una catastrofe lontana ma già palpabile – e in particolare su tre famiglie, unite da divergenti tradizioni aristocratiche e separate da irreali visioni del futuro. La prima è costituita da solidi rentiers ebrei di Berlino, nel cuore del Nord prussiano e protestante; le altre due appartengono «a realtà discordi del Sud cattolico: l’una sonnolenta, rurale, volta al passato; l’altra ossessionata da sogni ecumenici di dimensioni europee». A unirle provvederanno due matrimoni e uno scandalo. Ma, come gli archeologi sanno bene, i mondi sottratti all’ingiuria del tempo, per non sgretolarsi, vanno sigillati. In queste pagine accade invece che su tutto – sulla galleria di personaggi di incantevole eccentricità, sullo sconvolgente segreto che ne suggella la sorte, sui dialoghi incalzanti e magnificamente orchestrati – passi il vento ilare e turbinoso dello stile di Sybille Bedford, che accompagna e accelera la dissoluzione del mondo appena rivelato, fissandolo al tempo stesso, per sempre, nella memoria del lettore. "Il retaggio" è uscito per la prima volta nel 1956.

Sybille Bedford

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