Sybille Bedford
| Sybille Bedford | |
|---|---|
Bedford in 1989
|
|
| Born |
16 March 1911 Charlottenburg, Germany |
| Died | 17 February 2006 (aged 94) London, England, UK |
| Occupation | Novelist, journalist |
| Period | 1953–2005 |
Sybille Bedford, OBE (16 March 1911 – 17 February 2006) was a German-born English writer. She was a writer of non-fiction and semi-autobiographical fiction books and a lesbian.
She was born as Freiin Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, west of Berlin, to Baron Maximilian Josef von Schoenebeck (1853–1925), a German aristocrat, retired lieutenant colonel and art collector, and his German-Jewish wife, Elisabeth Bernhardt (1888–1937). Sybille was raised in the Roman Catholic faith of her father at Schloss Feldkirch in Baden. She had a half-sister by her father's first marriage, Maximiliane Henriette von Schoenebeck (later Nielsen, aka Jacko or Catsy). Her parents divorced in 1918, and she remained with her father, under somewhat impoverished circumstances in the midst of his art and wine collection. He 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.[1] During those years she studied in England, lodging in Hampstead.
In the early 1920s, Sybille often travelled between England and Italy. With the rise of fascism in Italy, though, her mother and stepfather settled in Sanary-sur-Mer, a small fishing village in the south of France. Sybille herself settled there as a teenager, living near Aldous Huxley, with whom she became friends. 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. Meanwhile, her mother became addicted to morphine, which had been prescribed by a local doctor, and became increasingly dysfunctional.
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