Sybille Bedford , author of ‘The Legacy’ whose novels examined the relationship between freedom and fate, dies at 94
The Independent Online
Sybille von Schoenebeck, writer: born Charlottenburg, Germany 16 March 1911; OBE 1981; FRSL 1964; CLit 1994; married 1935 Walter Bedford; died London 17 February 2006.
Sybille Bedford belonged to that distinguished line of 20th-century expatriate authors who chose to write in English in preference to their native tongues, in her case German. Her grand predecessors were, she believed, Conrad, Isak Dinesen, and Nabokov, for whom English was a third language, but the one in which their creative powers came to full fruition. They enriched English literature with contributions from their own cultures, and by their use of the language - a striving for clarity and grace which gave their writings a charming quirkiness similar to a slight, attractive foreign accent.
Her first book, A Visit to Don Otavio, was published in 1953 and was highly acclaimed. It was an amusing and serious account of a year she had spent in Mexico in the mid-Forties, which she defined as “an unusual travel book written by a novelist”. It described the beauty of Mexico with its underlying sadness and violence inherited from a bloody history.
Three years later she published her first novel, The Legacy, considered her masterpiece. At first it was a critical and commercial flop: “the dullest book I ever read”, declared her own American publisher. Eventually Evelyn Waugh reviewed it in The Spectator and it took off, becoming a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. It was televised 20 years later, in 1975, and has been reprinted several times since.
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