12 Facts About Sybille Bedford

Sybille Bedford, OBE was a German-born English writer of non-fiction and semi-autobiographical fiction books.

Sybille Bedford was a recipient of the Golden PEN Award.

Sybille Bedford was born as Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, west of Berlin in the Kingdom of Prussia, to Maximilian Josef von Schoenebeck, a German aristocrat, retired lieutenant colonel and art collector, and his German Jewish wife, Elisabeth Bernhardt.

Sybille Bedford's parents divorced in 1918, and she remained with her father, under somewhat impoverished circumstances in the midst of his art and wine collection.

Sybille Bedford died in 1925, when she was 14 years old, and Sybille went to live in Italy with her mother and stepfather, an Italian architectural student.

Sybille Bedford herself settled there as a teenager, living near Aldous Huxley, with whom she became friends.

Sybille Bedford interacted with and was influenced by many of the German writers who settled in the area during that time, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht.

In 1933, Sybille Bedford published an article critical of the Nazi regime in Die Sammlung, the literary magazine of Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann.

Sybille Bedford followed the Huxleys to California and spent the rest of World War II in the United States.

Sybille Bedford spent the remainder of the 1940s living in France and Italy.

Sybille Bedford spent the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s living in France, Italy, Britain and Portugal, and during that period had a twenty-year relationship with the American female novelist Eda Lord.

Sybille Bedford worked for PEN, was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1994 became a Companion of Literature.