Sara Wheeler

Sybille Bedford — a gifted writer but a monstrous snob

Her books are much admired, but she was impossibly arrogant, and exploited her friends mercilessly, according to Selina Hastings

A fine writer, but a monster: Sybille Bedford emerges as arrogant, fickle, snobbish and exploitative. Credit: © Sandra Lousada/Mary Evans Picture Library 
issue 07 November 2020

Sybille Bedford died in 2006, just short of 95. She left four novels, a travel book, two volumes of legal process and a memoir. Selina Hastings has written a wonderful biography, with lashings of lesbian lovers, which provides a soundtrack to one version of the 20th century.

Born German in 1911, Bedford grew up in a schloss in Baden’s Feldkirch, near the French border, her father a Bavarian Catholic baron and old soldier, her mother a beautiful and unstable bolter.

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