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. ‘Her childhood,’ writes Hastings, whose previous books include lives of Nancy Mitford, Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, ‘was both intellectually inspirational and… emotionally deprived.’ Both parents were wealthy.

Short and sturdy, with cornflower-blue eyes, a high brow and blonde hair cut ‘boyishly’, Bedford was restlessness made flesh. She liked France and England best, and enjoyed long stints in Italy (chiefly Rome) and seven years in the US, the latter mostly in California.

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