Selina Hastings:  Sybille Bedford – An Appetite for Life, Chatto & Windus, London,  (Penguin Random House Group) , 9781784741136, hardback, pub date: November 2020

I came across Sybille Bedford as an author during my time at Penguin and devoured her autobiographical last book “Quicksands”. What an unusual woman and what an extraordinary life.   Drawn very much to nonfiction and biographies at the moment, I was very happy to see Selina Hasting’s “Sybille Bedford – An Appetite for Life” announced to be published in November and lucky enough to read an early proof. Selina Hastings has written an incredibly thorough and objective account of Sybille Bedford’s fascinating cosmopolitan life.

Born in 1911 in Germany of aristocratic half-Jewish parents  who had a disastrous marriage, she spent her turbulent childhood in Germany but lived the majority of her adult life like a vagabond between France, England, Italy and the WWII years in the USA and some time in Mexico.  Her relationship with her promiscuous mother Lisa was  a very difficult one at best with her half sister Katzi often providing much needed support in her early years. Bedford  always knew she wanted to be a writer soon travelling in prominent intellectual circle although it took years before she took pen to paper.  Being openly Lesbian with some bisexual affairs, she had an incredible sexual appetite up into old age falling in and out of love constantly, often affairs turning into lifelong friendships with former lovers providing financial support when she was hard up. Her most famous entanglement was with Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria who became mentors and lifelong friends arranging a “bugger marriage” to a Mr. Bedford in England enabling her to become a British subject during a time of political upheaval in Europe when her assets were frozen in Germany. 

Bedford’s social and intellectual life was extraordinary and reads like a European who is who of writers and artists. What astonished me the most was how readily everyone put up friends for months, sometimes years in their houses offering financial and emotional support if needed affording Sybille Bedford her restless life style moving from country to country without a home base for many years.  She was a terrific wine and food connoisseur but also a terrible snob looking down on people who did not meet her intellectual expectations or background, selfishly demanding her lovers to support her eccentric lifestyle disregarding their needs.  

 I became very irritated with her behavior several times during the read but this is a fascinating biography of an unusual woman who was not a feminist and lived up to  95 despite the large amounts of food and drink she had consumed in her life.
But it is also a historical document of a century and an incomprehensible life style that has completely disappeared.