The South African Music Thread!

[Lisnaholic]

Thanks for asking! She was a writer, active from the 50s through to the 80s. Today it's possible that her life is seen as more exciting than her books: she was buffeted around Europe by the Second World War, meeting various famous writers and ending up for a while in California. If, like me, you enjoy a bit of celeb gossip, you might be amused by these details that come from her Wikipedia page:-

Sybille entered a marriage of convenience with an English Army officer, Walter "Terry" Bedford (an ex-boyfriend of a former manservant of W. H. Auden's) and obtained a British passport. With assistance from Aldous and Maria Huxley, Bedford left France for America in advance of the German invasion of 1940. She followed the Huxleys to California and spent the rest of World War II in the United States.

[After the war] Bedford spent the remainder the 1940s living in France and Italy. During this time she had a love affair with an American woman, Evelyn W. Gendel, who left her husband for Bedford and became a writer and editor herself. In the 1950s Bedford became Martha Gellhorn's confidante.

My five cents is that Martha Gellhorn's grass-roots journalism makes for better reading today than Sybille Bedford's books, which don't quite shake off the atmosphere of privilege with which she was surrounded. Still, Sybille could come up with a good one-liner, which is why I have that quote of hers: written in her notebook while on a long train journey, isn't it a question that we are all perpetually asking ourselves?