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Sybille Bedford
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Sybille Bedford, Order of the British Empire 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 British Vogue Vogue.
Aldous Huxley: 1894-1939 Volume 1 of 2-volume biography of Aldous Huxley Chatto and Windus; Collins 1973 9780002160063 https://books.google.com/books?id=Y728wAEACAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=forty-five+thousand 129 (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 https://books.google.com/books?id=4eYUAAAAYAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=poverty 92 (288 pages)
The Pre-Columbian Mexico 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 basin 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, Sense and sensuality (review of Quicksands: A Memoir by Sybille Bedford) 25 June 2005 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jun/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview
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, Obituary. Sybille Bedford, A novelist searching for truth among social elites and courtroom dramas 21 February 2006 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/feb/21/guardianobituaries.germany
External links
Walter Bedford Orlando (orlando.cambridge.org) Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present https://orlando.cambridge.org/people/551444cf-4052-4ed3-9ab9-89a927daa61a
Obiituary. Sybille Bedford 21 February 2006 The Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1510996/Sybille-Bedford.html
Category:1911 births
Category:2006 deaths
Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Category:Journalists from England
Category:Journalists from Germany
Category:LGBT people
Category:Memoirists from England
Category:Memoirists from Germany
Category:Novelists from England
Category:Novelists from Germany
Category:People from Berlin
Category:Women authors from Germany
Category:Women born in the 1910s
Category:Women authors from England