A World-Class Writer and a World-Class Freeloader
Sybille Bedford, at right, in Normandy with Allanah Harper, a lover turned friend and provider.Credit...via the Sybille Bedford Estate
Buy Book ▾
By Brooke Allen
By Selina Hastings
Sybille Bedford is not a household name, but among her coterie of admirers in Europe and America she is held in high esteem. Her reputation rests upon a relatively slim literary output over the course of a long life (1911-2006): notably, four works of fiction (three earlier novels were deemed inferior and remain unpublished), a memoir, books about travel and international legal processes, a biography of her friend Aldous Huxley that is still the definitive one, and sundry journalism. Her first published novel, “A Legacy” (1956), rescued from possible oblivion by Evelyn Waugh’s encomium in The Spectator, has become something of a cult classic. She had limitations as a writer, the most significant being that she really had only one story to tell: that of her own life. But what a life it was! And now here we have it, elegantly related by Selina Hastings, the author of finely wrought, literate biographies of Somerset Maugham, Nancy Mitford and Waugh himself.