Please, Do Write
On sale
4th February 2027
Price: £20
‘One of the finest and most original prose stylists of her age’ COLM TÓIBÍN
‘She cannot write a dull page’ FINANCIAL TIMES
‘A writer who teaches us how to live’ PARIS REVIEW
Born into a German Jewish aristocratic family, Sybille Bedford lived an extraordinary life, surviving both world wars, moving from continent to continent, loving deeply and writing brilliantly.
At forty-one, she had her first book published, and her work – including the modern classic novels Jigsaw and A Legacy – went on to secure her reputation as one of the most original and exacting prose stylists of the twentieth century.
This carefully edited selection of letters shows that extraordinary writer like never before. Spanning the 1930s to the 1980s, the correspondence follows her across France, wartime America, Italy, Mexico and London.
Often written on the move, these letters – impulsively scratched onto thin, green typing paper – capture a life never anchored in one place. They show a great writer wrestling with self-doubt, heartache, creative blocks and ill-health. But, above all, they tell the story of her great loves, with many of these letters addressed to three women with whom she had romantic relationships. As she famously said, she would have written more, had she loved less.
Full of warmth, affection, honesty and wit, Please, Do Write offers a window into the life and work of a writer – and a woman – in transit.
‘She cannot write a dull page’ FINANCIAL TIMES
‘A writer who teaches us how to live’ PARIS REVIEW
Born into a German Jewish aristocratic family, Sybille Bedford lived an extraordinary life, surviving both world wars, moving from continent to continent, loving deeply and writing brilliantly.
At forty-one, she had her first book published, and her work – including the modern classic novels Jigsaw and A Legacy – went on to secure her reputation as one of the most original and exacting prose stylists of the twentieth century.
This carefully edited selection of letters shows that extraordinary writer like never before. Spanning the 1930s to the 1980s, the correspondence follows her across France, wartime America, Italy, Mexico and London.
Often written on the move, these letters – impulsively scratched onto thin, green typing paper – capture a life never anchored in one place. They show a great writer wrestling with self-doubt, heartache, creative blocks and ill-health. But, above all, they tell the story of her great loves, with many of these letters addressed to three women with whom she had romantic relationships. As she famously said, she would have written more, had she loved less.
Full of warmth, affection, honesty and wit, Please, Do Write offers a window into the life and work of a writer – and a woman – in transit.
Reviews
She chose to write in English and was one of the language's great twentieth-century stylists . . . Her distinctive rhythms: the unmistakable clipped dialogue, the lush yet spare descriptions of landscape, the wit, the withholding, and the questioning that make her prose her own
She won't waste our time on what, she assumes, we already understand. That is one of the joys of reading her: she thinks we are as sophisticated as she is. Her writing is like the conversation of a clever, worldly friend who we wish would come by more often
She is the most sensual of writers, with a painterly gift for evoking atmosphere, place, gardens, interiors . . . There will always be people for whom her books are part of their mind's life, and people who are discovering her for the first time as if entering a lighted room
One of the finest and most original prose stylists of her age
Everything about Bedford's writing was curious, not least the semipermeable boundary between fact and fiction
Her sentences are both light and dense, each word doing the work of about three, and it's as though she were viewing the room from an angle not accessible to anyone else
Sybille Bedford is a distinguished and neglected writer