Sybille Bedford - Career As A Writer

Career As A Writer

After the war, Bedford spent a year traveling in Mexico. Her experiences on that trip would form the basis of her first published book, a travelogue entitled The Sudden View: a Mexican Journey, which was published in 1953. Bedford spent the remainder of the 1940s living in France and Italy. During this time she had a love affair with an American woman, Evelyn W. Gendel, who left her husband for Bedford and became a writer and editor herself. In the 1950s she became Martha Gellhorn's confidante.

A Legacy, Bedford's second book and first novel, was published in 1956 (successfully dramatised by BBC television in 1975), and was described by Francis King as "one of the great books of the 20th century". Though ostensibly a work of fiction, it was somewhat autobiographical - it presents a stylized version of her father's life, as well as some of the author's early childhood, in Germany. That novel was a success, and enabled Bedford to continue writing. In her lifetime, she published three more novels as well as numerous works of non-fiction. As a writer of non-fiction, Bedford was best known as a travel writer and as a legal reporter.

Bedford spent the 1950s, 60s and 70s living in France, Italy, Britain and Portugal, and during this period had a twenty-year relationship with the American female novelist Eda Lord. In 1979 she settled in Chelsea in London. In 1981 she was appointed OBE. She worked for PEN, was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1994 became a Companion of Literature. Bedford's final work was Quicksands, a memoir published in 2005.