Sybille Bedford

A Life

By: Selina Hastings

Narrated by: Anne Flosnik

The first biography of the universally acclaimed British writer, Sybille Bedford, by the celebrated author of books about Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.

Passionate, liberated, fiercely independent, Sybille Bedford was a writer and a journalist, the author of 10 books, including a biography of Aldous Huxley, and four novels, all of which fictionalized her extraordinary life. Born in Berlin, she grew up in Baden, first with her distant, aristocratic father, and then in France with her intellectual, narcissistic, morphine-addicted mother and her lover. She was a child with a German-Jewish background who survived two world wars and went on to spend her adult life in exile in France, Italy, New York, and Los Angeles, before finally settling in England.

Bedford was ahead of her time in many ways, with great enthusiasm for life and all its sensual pleasures, including friendships with bold faced names in the worlds of literature and food as well as a literary network of high-powered lesbians. Aldous Huxley became a mentor, and Martha Gellhorn encouraged her to write her first novel, A Legacy; in 1989, her novel Jigsaw was short-listed for the Booker Prize. In the 1960s, she wrote for magazines and newspapers, covering nearly 100 trials, including those of Auschwitz officials accused of Nazi war crimes and Jack Ruby, on trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Brenda Wineapple has called Bedford "one of the finest stylists of the 20th century, bar none". In this major biography, Selina Hastings has brilliantly captured the fierce intelligence, wit, curiosity, and compassion of the woman and the writer in all the richness of her character and achievements.

©2021 Selina Hastings (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“In this well-wrought biography of one of England’s most celebrated authors of both fiction and nonfiction, Selina Hastings’s Sybille Bedford is a work the likes of which arrive on the biographical scene only rarely, destined to become foundational.... In this copiously noted literary explication of a life well-lived, Hastings is, at once, consummate storyteller and astute literary anthropologist, unpacking and interpreting her subject’s passions and predilections against a backdrop of literature; war and fascism; food; friendships both true and not; joy, and the encroachment of age, which did not slow Bedford down, until it did. Riveting.” (Elissa Altman, Avenue)

“Throughout Bedford’s books, the depth of human tragedy lies just beneath a comedy of manners.... Selina Hastings, acclaimed biographer of Somerset Maugham and Nancy Mitford, fills in many of the blanks that Bedford, basically a reticent person, left even when writing obliquely of herself and a wide circle that included Martha Gellhorn and Thomas Mann. [Sybille Bedford is] gracefully written, largely sympathetic, and very gossipy.” (Brenda Wineapple, The Wall Street Journal)

"This is such a fantastic read...Hastings’ delicious biography, with its abundance of intricate and intimate detail, is total heaven. It helps that her subject wrote novels...that were thinly disguised autobiographies, and that the material is so very rich.... [This biography] brings a fundamentally shy and private woman out into the light and is populated by the sorts of people who don’t seem to exist anymore - madly clever, slightly louche, culturally omnivorous, sexually fluid, crisscrossing Europe and each other in search of fun and new ideas." (India Knight, The Sunday Times)

Fascinating

I meted out small moments to listen because I never wanted this story to end. A fascinating masterpiece.

Sybille Bedford

This biography shares facts about Bedford that show her long life to have been peripatetic and full of fortunate circumstance. I see her talent but alas can seldom see her appeal. She comes across as arrogant and self-centered, taking the sacrifices and generosity of others for granted. Her talent at writing, nourished in a long life with all the time in the world to cultivate it, isn’t enough to make me admire her.