I once owned every novel Sybille Bedford wrote. This wasn’t a great accomplishment, since she only wrote four novels over 95 years. But when I went to look for A Legacy (1956), considered by many her finest novel, I couldn’t find it. This is one of the sad side-effects of a quick purge of bookshelves, like the one I did two years ago. Books that seem like so many dust magnets when the priority is housecleaning and orderly bookshelves become desirable items years later when re-reading that very book is the perfect solace.

I did find Bedford’s 1963 novel, A Favourite of the Gods, on one of the basement shelves. It was a perfect bookish companion for a two-day trip out of town. As I was gathering notes for this essay, I realized that in some ways, it didn’t matter than I couldn’t find the original book I wanted. Over the course of her four novels and her memoir Quicksand, published in 2005, the year before she died, Bedford returned to the same (or similar) characters and stories—tales of mothers and daughters in Europe in the early part of the twentieth century. It was a story not that far removed from Bedford’s own life.

Bedford was one of those writers—like Conrad or Nabokov—who learned English as a second or third or fourth language but adopted it as the one in which to write books. Bedford was born in Germany in 1911. Her mother abandoned the family when Bedford was still quite young, and Bedford spent her childhood with her father, a man then in his sixties. He died when she was ten and she went to live with friends of the family in England, and then rejoined her mother and Italian stepfather, moving between Italy and France.

Bedford’s education was as eclectic as her home life; she was mainly homeschooled by tutors or professors who were friends of her mother. In the 1930s, they settled in Sanary-sur-Mer, in the south of France. This small fishing village had become a haven for all sorts of German artists and writers escaping the rise of German fascism. Bedford became close to both Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley (she published a biography of Huxley in the 1970s). She had a very brief marriage of convenience with an Englishman, Walter Bedford, providing her with British citizenship at a crucial time just before WWII. She spent the war years in Hollywood with Huxley and his wife, and then settled in England after the war.

In her writing, Bedford worked her childhood over and over like a potter with a lump of clay. In A Favourite of the Gods, for example, her second novel, the main characters are Anna, an American heiress who marries an Italian prince; her daughter, Constanza; and Constanza’s daughter, Flavia. The novel is bookended by the story of Constanza and by Flavia, who is the sometime narrator of the novel, starting with the evocative opening sentence, “One autumn in the late nineteen-twenties, for no particular reason at all, as it would seem, we began to live in France.”

Constanza, divorced, is traveling from Italy to Belgium to get remarried. She travels with her daughter, Flavia, who is about 12 at the time. After a surprise visit at a train station from Constanza’s younger brother, Giorgio, Constanza realizes that a ruby ring is missing. The ring was a gift from her mother to her father when Constanza was a girl, and then given Constanza years later, when her parents were divorced and she was living with her mother in London. Mother and daughter get off the train at a small town in the south of France, ostensibly to continue their search for the ring before traveling much farther. A stay of hours turns into days, even as concerned telegrams come in from Constanza’s mother and financé. Flavia notes at the end of this prologue, “As a matter of fact, we stayed for eleven years.”

The remainder of the novel is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the evolution and then dissolution of the marriage of Anna and her Italian prince and their life in Rome and the countryside around that city. The second part features Anna and Constanza, removed to London after Anna’s divorce. The last part focuses on Constanza and Flavia, moving between London and Rome and then France, as Constanza flees her own broken marriage.

The conflict between romance and love, and between the expectations of one’s station in life, and freedom, are recurring themes in the book. At a time just before Anna’s marriage breaks up, she is visited by her brother-in-law. “He was far from being a fool and he had lived in Europe for twenty years. He had heard things.” Things such as the other love affairs of Anna’s husband that she seemed oblivious to. Calling Anna a romantic, he says, “My dear, romantics are dangerous animals. To themselves, and to others.” Later, Anna and Constanza discuss a man whom Anna hopes her daughter will marry.

“One doesn’t marry like that,” said Constanza, “just like that. For a bit of love.”

Anna chose to laugh. “You don’t know yet, my dear, what one marries for.”

Not at all nicely, Constanza said: “Perhaps you can tell me?”

‘I was dazzled,” Anna said, and a soft look came into her eyes.

“Oh, you were then? Ah, you see – it isn’t the best reason, the best way to marry.”

Anna’s voice was still dreamy. “I was dazzled by Italy.”

“It’s only an instinct I have. There must be some community of interests, perhaps a common aim, great liking for one another, appreciation, tolerance –”

“It sounds like a description of us,” he said.

“It is not.”

“You left out love,” he said.

“Love does not last. And when it’s gone it leaves the wrong kind of residue for a life in common.”

Bedford does not fit neatly into any school of writing. She was a fitful writer—she didn’t publish anything until she was 42—a travel book. In the 1950s she wrote several pieces, mainly on high profile court cases for American magazines. But her novels were few and far between and she wasn’t part of any literary set. In a 2005 profile in “The New Yorker,” Joan Acocella refers to her as a “loose piece in the literary canon.”

The finest writers, however, can make great art with sparse materials. Bedford took a unique upbringing, leavened by exposure to some of the great European authors of the early 20th century, and turned it into small literary treasures.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it