Sybille bedford biography of mahatma

Sybille bedford biography of mahatma: A pictorial history of the world's

Bedford was ahead of her time in many ways, with great enthusiasm for life and all its sensual pleasures, including friendships with bold faced names in the worlds of literature and food as well as a literary network of high-powered lesbians. Aldous Huxley became a mentor, and Martha Gellhorn encouraged her to write her first novel, A Legacy ; inher novel Jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In the s, she wrote for magazines and newspapers, covering nearly trials, including those of Auschwitz officials accused of Nazi war crimes and Jack Ruby, on trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Encouraged by Aldous Huxley, Bedford began writing fiction at the age of sixteen and went on to publish four novels, all influenced by her itinerant childhood among the European aristocracy: A LegacyA Favourite of the GodsA Compass Errorand Jigsawshort-listed for the Booker Prize.

She was a prolific travel writer, the author of a two-volume biography of her friend Aldous Huxley, and a legal journalist, covering nearly one hundred trials. In she was awarded the Order of the British Empire. You'll have immediate subscriber-only access to over 1, issues and 25, articles published since Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25, articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

In other projects. Wikidata item. German-born English non-fiction writer — Early life [ edit ]. Career as a writer [ edit ]. Awards and honours [ edit ]. Works [ edit ].

Sybille bedford biography of mahatma: Binding: Paperback · Publisher:

References [ edit ]. Retrieved 11 January English PEN. Archived from the original on 21 November Retrieved 3 December Often called "Jamesian" for its account of a wealthy American girl who marries a corrupt Roman minor aristocrat, it is James-like only in theme. Over-filled with incident, the novel relates the education of Constanza, Anna's daughter, who is brought up in Edwardian England when Anna cannot stomach her husband's adultery.

Again people eat and drink fabulously, fall in and out of loves and beds, while potted history is served in chunks: "Meanwhile, Mussolini marched on Rome. Constanza marries Simon Herbert, the author's least convincing character. A pacifist by conviction, he nevertheless is commissioned and sent to the trenches, emerging promptly with a convenient wound.

A brilliant career follows, and an arranged divorce from Constanza permits his marriage to a press tycoon's daughter. Simon dies young. Constanza's daughter, Flavia, is born in ; after the war, Contanza moves from lover to lover but remains unmarried and at odds with Anna, the dowager-heroine. Wonderful episodes occur, but the novel suffers from a weak structure and a surfeit of raw matter.

Flavia is the narrator of A Compass Errorthe structure of which is pure disaster.

Sybille bedford biography of mahatma: The novelist Sybille Bedford,

Left alone at 17 in Provence to swot for entrance to Oxford, Flavia engages in a lesbian affair and consumes some 53 pages of this brief novel to recapitulate in monologue to her lover the entire contents of A Favourite of the Gods. A psychologically improbable plot involving Constanza's last chance at marriage to a French intellectual unfolds.

Flavia is again precocious, a great imbiber of claret, and intellectually ambitious as well as bisexual. Plot tends to falsify chronicle, which has its own twists and turns. Jigsaw is a novel only by courtesy. Despite some novelistic touches, it is transparently personal memoir, as well as an explanation of the structural difficulties of the two preceding novels.

We are back in the territory of Legacywith the story of young Billi's for Sybille early years at Feldkirch with her father, the impoverished Julius, eating smoked mutton but drinking the rare clarets surviving from better days.

Sybille bedford biography of mahatma: Mahatma Gandhi's principles of nonviolent living.

Like Flavia, like Constanza, she moves as a young girl to London, then to Provence, and the dubious tutelage of her egotistical, beautiful, self-indulgent mother, who declines into poverty and drug addiction. Again the text is packed with incident, with essays on wine and politics, but now with actual historical figures: Aldous and Maria Huxley; Cyril ConnollyRoy Campbell, Ivy Compton-Burnett among them.

Again a precocious girl aspires to university and fails, but a writer's career beckons that distinguished career as travel writer and reporter which has also been Bedford's. Characters and entire episodes are lifted from the preceding narratives, but the story is frankly her own, with elements of confession and muted justification. Although eminently readable, the whole fails to do justice to splendid parts.