Legacy by Sybille Bedford- 1956 -385 Pages - Introduction 2015 by Brenda Wineapple

Legacy by Sybille Bedford- 1956 -385 Pages  - Introduction 2015 by Brenda Wineapple

Sybille Bedford 

 March 16, Berlin, Germany 

February 17, 2006 - London, England 

"The Merzes are longstanding members of Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie who count a friend of Goethe among their distinguished ancestors.

Not that this proud legacy means much of anything to them anymore. Secure in their huge town house, they devote themselves to little more than enjoying their comforts and ensuring their wealth. The Feldens are landed aristocracy, well off but not rich, from Germany’s Catholic south. After Julius von Felden marries Melanie Merz the fortunes of the two families will be strangely, indeed fatally, entwined. 

Set during the run-up to World War I, a time of weirdly mingled complacency and angst, A Legacy is captivating, magnificently funny, and profound, an unforgettable image of a doomed way of life." From the Publisher 

Considered her finest novel, Legacy has to me a deeply cultured old world feel.

A Legacy, her finest novel, and superb by any standard, is partly about memory, both personal and cultural. “We are said to re-invent our memories; we often re-arrange them,” comments its narrator, a woman born shortly before the advent of World War I who pieces together her peculiar inheritance from the rumors, innuendoes, and snatches of conversation she heard as a child: the tale of a long-ago family scandal that once almost toppled the government. “In a sense this is my story,” she reflects. “I do not know a time when I was not imprinted with the experiences of others.” Her peculiar inheritance, then, is also the story of Prussian pride, political scandal, anti-Semitism, and moral negligence, which is the legacy, in a word, of the twentieth century.

Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings - 2020 -432 Pages

 Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings  - 2020 - 432 Pages 

March 16, Berlin, Germany 

February 17, 2006 - London, England 

Previously I have pasted upon two biographies of authors from Selina Hastings, on Rosamond Lehmann and also one on W. Somerset Maugham.

Both of the biographies are marvellous so I was delighted to find her latest work Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings available via Libby,

She had the bitter sadness of losing her much loved father when she was fourteen, and the misfortune to have to manage living with her mother Lisa,needy, selfish, anti-maternal, irresponsible, and later to be her carer before the drug-addicted Lisa was sent back to Hitler’s Germany for enforced detox treatment under the care of her own elderly mother, where she soon died. These difficult life circumstances deserve commiseration and sympathy.

 But throughout the rest of the biography Sybille turned into an amiable freeloading sociable partygoer, a growing authority on wine and an excellent cook and gourmand, who talked about writing a novel for twenty years before actually getting down to writing it.

As Sybille was so very, very fortunate in the friends who supported her throughout her life we have to assume that she was charming, delightful, fun and nice to have around. I can’t think that merely being an orphaned deserving cause would have been enough to warrant the colossal generosity and freely given accommodation, cheques and trips to and from the USA that so many of her friends bestowed upon She went through lovers like other women might go through hats or a pair of shoes, mostly women but a few men thrown in the mix.  

Hastings details the reasons for Sybille's hatred of her native Germany and her love for France.  Sybille in an arranged marriage, the himosexual groom was paid, was able to get a visa to England just before the Germans occupied Paris.  The account of her trip to Mexico was very interesting.  

Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist, biographer of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Rosamund Lehmann, Sybille Bedford and, in The Red Earl, of her father.

She is the winner of the Marsh Biography Prize, the Spear's Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Award.