Sybille Bedford

Sybille Bedford, OBE (née Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck; 16 March 1911 – 17 February 2006) was a German-born, English novelist, memoirist, and journalist. Her journalism deals with travel, food and wine, and dramatic courtroom trials. She was elected in 1964 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1994 a Companion of Literature. She was appointed in 1981 an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Quotes

• Crome Yellow ... had been earning its advance, and Aldous was being paid royalties. The book sold 2,500 copies in the first year and 86 the year after. (This Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald's first novel published the year before, sold forty-five thousand.) Cash in hand, Aldous enrolled Suzanne in an art course he had seen advertised in Vogue.
  • Aldous Huxley: 1894-1939. Volume 1 of 2-volume biography of Aldous Huxley. Chatto and Windus; Collins. 1973. p. 129. ISBN 9780002160063.  (400 pages; Suzanne Nys was the sister of Aldous Huxley's first wife, Maria Nys.)

The Sudden View (1953)

• The descendants of the Aztecs sleeping on the pavements of Mexico City are paupers. We speak of poverty as being abject, extreme, dire, genteel; crippling, unmitigated, relative. It can be all of these, but it is always the last.
  • The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1953. p. 92.  (288 pages)

• The Indians were delighted to accept a new god, but reluctant to relinquish many of the old ones.
  • p. 193

Quotes about Sybille Bedford

• Sybille Bedford is the most sensual of writers. No one writes as she does about the smells and colours of the Mediterranean, about the pleasure of food and wine, or — in contrast — about the overstuffed house of a solid Jewish family in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. A short paragraph of hers can expand in the reader's mind into a hinterland of suggestion and sensation. However does she do it? She says in Quicksands that she took a lesson from Ernest Hemingway's remark that "all you have to do is to write one true sentence, and then go on from there".
  • Victoria Glendinning, (25 June 2005) "Sense and sensuality (review of Quicksands: A Memoir by Sybille Bedford)". The Guardian.

• No writer played less to the gallery. Often shy, she could nevertheless tell marvellously funny stories about Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Edith Wharton or the fastidious Huxleys in India, offered a meal of chocolates, ice cream, dumplings stuffed with curried mice. One remembers a sturdy, trousered figure, bright blue eyes, effective and observant, the clipped voice quickening at an ungenerous remark or deference to some fashionable fraud. Always she treasured "that sense of lighter heart, deep-grooved pleasures, daylight and proportion". Her memoir, Quicksands (2005), revived interest in the writer, and her elegant, insightful work.
  • Peter Vansittart, (21 February 2006) "Obituary. Sybille Bedford, A novelist searching for truth among social elites and courtroom dramas". The Guardian.

External links

• Walter Bedford. Orlando (orlando.cambridge.org) Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present.
• (21 February 2006) "Obiituary. Sybille Bedford". The Telegraph.