Sybille bedford biography for kids

A Legacy was widely praised. But we gratefully salute a new artist. From her earliest appearances in print the name of Sybille Bedford increasingly became synonymous with a style both elegant and spare. Like most real writers, Sybille always knew that she wanted to write. It is very true and honourable and exact, just as she is. In Sybille made a marriage of convenience in order to obtain a British passport, her Jewish ancestry making it unwise for her to remain under German jurisdiction.

She settled permanently in London in , although she always remained a citizen of the world, at home in many countries and in many tongues, with the exception of Germany and German, from both of which until the very end of her life she chose to keep her distance. Her imagination was fed by her passion for reading, and her knowledge of European, and later American, literature was unusually wide in scope.

English, however, was the language she loved the most, and like Conrad, Nabokov, Isak Dinesen before her, she became a master practitioner. English with its flexible structures and rich vocabulary provided her with just the instrument she wanted, and also it gave her a kind of life-line. The elder Merzes are wealthy philistines given to large, frequent meals and to generosity to their feckless offspring and their children, who acquire "the habit of being rich.

The death of Julius's Merz wife, Melanie, a dim, determined girl, leads to his marriage to an Englishwoman, Caroline Trafford, a beautiful, fickle, interesting wife and, briefly, mother. The actual legacies are frittered away, and the figurative legacy of Caroline to Julius is a German house and a precocious daughter, who supposedly is narrator.

The chronicle is mainly narrated in the third person. A Favourite of the Gods , set in Italy, might appear to be a departure from A Legacy , but it is not. Often called "Jamesian" for its account of a wealthy American girl who marries a corrupt Roman minor aristocrat, it is James-like only in theme. Over-filled with incident, the novel relates the education of Constanza, Anna's daughter, who is brought up in Edwardian England when Anna cannot stomach her husband's adultery.

Again people eat and drink fabulously, fall in and out of loves and beds, while potted history is served in chunks: "Meanwhile, Mussolini marched on Rome. Constanza marries Simon Herbert, the author's least convincing character. A pacifist by conviction, he nevertheless is commissioned and sent to the trenches, emerging promptly with a convenient wound.

A brilliant career follows, and an arranged divorce from Constanza permits his marriage to a press tycoon's daughter. Simon dies young. Constanza's daughter, Flavia, is born in ; after the war, Contanza moves from lover to lover but remains unmarried and at odds with Anna, the dowager-heroine. Wonderful episodes occur, but the novel suffers from a weak structure and a surfeit of raw matter.

Bedford spent the s, the s and the s living in France, Italy, Britain and Portugal, and during that period had a twenty-year relationship with the American female novelist Eda Lord. In she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Bedford's final work was Quicksands, a memoir published in Contents move to sidebar hide.

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Sybille bedford biography for kids

Wikidata item. German-born English non-fiction writer — Early life [ edit ]. Elegant, deft and restrained. This is a remarkably candid, minutely detailed and compulsively readable book about a life lived to the full. Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life.