shelleysdavies.com

I’m just back from a week in Mexico, having had the pleasure of Sybille Bedford‘s 1953 classic  book, ‘A Visit To Don Otavio, A Traveller’s Tale From Mexico’ to accompany me (my enjoyment of the book being added to by Jane Poulton‘s beautiful cover illustration). Bedford was known as a writer’s writer, telling and retelling her interesting life from various points of view, from her early beginnings in aristocratic Germany in 1911, her adolescent years in Italy and the South of France, growing up in the milieu of  Aldous Huxley et al, to her life in America during WWII, which she fled to when her Jewish heritage became known to the Nazis. She knew journalist Martha Gellhorn well, who encouraged her to write, with wonderful work ensuing. Covering a wide range of topics, from justice (she covered the biggest trials of the 20th century), biography and travel, to brilliant autobiographical books, both fiction and memoir (‘A Legacy’, ‘Jigsaw’ & ‘Quicksands’). Of  her book on Mexico she writes, ‘ I had a great longing to move, to hear another language, eat new food, to be in a great country with a long nasty history in the past and as little  present history as possible‘. She arrives in Mexico with a friend, as Bruce Chatwin notes in his introduction, ‘without itinerary, without preconceptions, and with their senses wide open’…

Read Joan Acocella’s fascinating article on her in The New Yorker, Brenda Wineapple’s Paris Review‘ biography of her and Lisa Cohen’s Paris Review article on Bedford’s centenary.