Sybille Bedford

A Favourite Of The Gods follows the journey of Constanza and her young daughter as they disembark a train in the French Riviera in the late 1920s, with no idea where they are headed. However, their story truly begins with Constanza's parents: a beautiful New England heiress, a Roman prince, and the confused catastrophe of their marriage. Constanza's idyllic childhood,...

On the marriage of Julius von Felden and Melanie Merz, the fortunes of two families are somewhat fatally entwined. In A Legacy, Sybille Bedford depicts their vastly different worlds: the wealthy bourgeois life of the Merzes in Berlin and the aristocratic eccentricity of the von Felden dynasty in rural Baden. Portrayed with exquisite wit and acute observation, their personal upheavals...