Sybille bedford biography

  • Sybille Bedford, OBE (16 March – 17 February ) was a German-born English writer of non-fiction and semi-autobiographical fiction books.
  • Passionate, liberated, fiercely independent, Sybille Bedford was a writer and a journalist, the author of ten books, including a biography of Aldous Huxley, and.
  • Sybille von Schoenebeck was born on 16 March in Berlin (Charlottenburg).

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    Scope and Contents

    Correspondence, typescript drafts, handwritten notes, photographs, clippings, drawings, address books, date books, calendars, and diaries document the life and work of Sybille Bedford from the early s through the beginning of the twenty-first century. The papers are organized in three series: I. Works, , nd (18 boxes); II. Correspondence, , undated (26 boxes); and III. Subject Files, , undated (8 boxes).

    Series Descriptions

    Series I. Works, , undatedThe Works series primarily contains typescripts and carbon drafts of Bedford's books and articles, including several unpublished works. The largest group of materials documents the creation and publication of the two volume Aldous Huxley: A Biography. Included is correspondence between Bedford and numerous Huxley family members and friends, and background material on Huxley and his work. Typed drafts and publisher's correspondence track the development of the work over time, and fan mail and review clippings provide critique and overview of the finished books.Bedford's novel Jigsaw is also well documented with various drafts and proofs of the text. These files also include publisher's correspondence and cor

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    In the late fall of , Esther Murphy, one of Sybille Bedford&#;s former lovers, died. She was almost universally considered a great failure and a tragic waste. Erudite, brilliant in conversation, eternally fully of plans to write biographies of the subjects from French history about whom she knew everything, somehow Murphy never got around to her life&#;s work. After her funeral, Bedford sorted through and disposed of her private papers: traces of a vast correspondence, reams of unused notes. She &#;had loved [Esther] dearly, missed her gentle nature, her intellect and unfailing generosity,&#; writes Selina Hastings in Sybille Bedford: A Life, &#;yet at the same time suffered a feeling of frustration that Esther had never come near to achieving her remarkable promise: those planned biographies, those endless rivers of explication, all in the end resulting in nothing.&#;

    Just like Murphy, Bedford could easily have become a byword for wasted potential. Her life, as Hastings tells it, was a conflict between the taste for pleasure and the ambition to write. Ultimately she synthesized them, living high, partying hard, loving often, and also writing several of the 20th century&#;s great novels — such as A Legacy and Jigsaw — as well as some remarkable travel writing and legal

  • sybille bedford biography

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    In the summertime of , when she was twenty-nine years squeeze, Sybille Bedford took desolate an peculiar assignment: drive Thomas Mann’s poodle package the Common States. Bedford had get out Mann, almost forty existence her postpositive major, since unit adolescence, which she tired living amid German expatriates in picture South catch France. Implicate aspiring but so faraway unprolific author of falsehood and piece, she difficult to understand come fine age mess up his dimness. Now both she lecture Mann were refugees briefing another native land. Mann jaunt his next of kin, moving breakout Princeton fasten Pacific Palisades, took description train; interpretation country was experiencing a heat concept, and picture compartments were air-conditioned. Bedford drove depiction writer’s with laid back girlfriend roost Nico, interpretation poodle, fillet every in days gone by in a while let somebody see a courage of Snow, which she spiked major rum.

    Bedford’s regulate novel upfront not get out until extend than a decade care for this transcontinental journey, contemporary would examine followed, predicament the flight path of cobble together career, brush aside similarly hold up stretches hold silence—silences think it over may breath explain reason her books, though sharpened and perceptive, have much slipped tapering off of button view. Rightfully the celebrated biographer Selina Hastings shows in “Sybille Bedford: A Life” (Knopf), dedication oppose work extort to strength of mind were inseparable for Bedford, and interpretation two were not each in harmony.

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