Sybille Bedford : An Appetite for Life – Hastings Selina (2020)

Born in Germany to aristocratic parents, Sybille Bedford's (1911-2006) life contained all the grand feeling and seismic events of the twentieth century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death, as well as the need to write and rescue something from this wreckage. Openly gay, Bedford once said, 'I wish I'd written more books and spent less time being in love. It's very difficult doing both at the same time.' In her forties, she published her breakthrough novel, A Legacy, continuing to publish until her early nineties, writing some of the outstanding and most original novels, memoirs, and travel books of the century. Bedford's father died when she was just fourteen, and her mother, a great socialite and litterateur, fell victim to a debilitating morphine addiction. Striking out on her own, Bedford fell under the spell of Aldous Huxley, who was to become her friend and mentor. Staying with Aldous and his wife Maria in their sunlit villa in the south of France between the wars were some of the happiest and most enlivening years of Bedford's life - even as she failed and failed again at finding her own voice on the page. And yet it was these years that would provide the...