Sybille Bedford

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SB was a largely twentieth-century writer who worked on the boundaries between fiction and fact. Her three initial novels (which create fictional characters partly from people in Bedford's own family or circle, and which evoke with particular historical vividness the political atmosphere of the times, recent but not contemporary, in which they are set) culminate in a memoir-novel which is one step closer to autobiography, and a twenty-first century memoir which separates autobiography from fiction. SB has also written biography, accounts of travel, and reports of celebrated trials, as well as reviews and articles on food, wine, and books.

Milestones

16 March 1911

Sybille Van Schoenebeck (later Bedford) was born at Charlottenburg, in Brandenburg (then in deep countryside but now part of Berlin).
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint.
274

1989

Hamish Hamilton issued SB 's Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education, A Biographical Novel, written the previous year.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

17 February 2006

SB died at the age of ninety-four.
Vansittart, Peter. “Obituary: Sybille Bedford”. Guardian Unlimited.

Biography

Birth and Background

16 March 1911

Sybille Van Schoenebeck (later Bedford) was born at Charlottenburg, in Brandenburg (then in deep countryside but now part of Berlin).
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint.
274