She was born as
Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in the city of
Charlottenburg (which was incorporated as a borough of western
Berlin in 1920) in the
Kingdom of Prussia, to Maximilian Josef von
Schoenebeck (1853–1925), a German aristocrat, retired
lieutenant colonel and
art collector, and his German
Jewish wife, Elisabeth Bernhardt (1888–1937). Sybille was raised in the
Roman Catholic faith of her father at
Castle Feldkirch in
Baden. By her father's first marriage to Melanie Herz, Bedford had a half-sister
Maximiliane Henriette von Schoenebeck (referred to as 'Jacko' in
Quicksands but in real life known as 'Catsy') who became Baroness von Dincklage on her marriage to
Hans Günther von Dincklage, a
press attaché at the
German Embassy in Paris. Bedford's parents divorced in 1918, and she remained with her father, under somewhat impoverished circumstances in the midst of his art and wine collection. He died in 1925, when she was 14 years old, and Sybille went to live in Italy with her mother and stepfather, Norberto Marchesani, an Italian architectural student. During those years she studied in England, lodging in
Hampstead. In the early 1920s, Sybille often travelled between England and Italy. Following the rise of fascism in Italy, her mother and stepfather settled in
Sanary-sur-Mer, a small coastal fishing village in
Provence in the south of France, near
Toulon and
Marseille. Sybille herself settled there as a teenager, living near
Aldous Huxley, with whom she became friends. Bedford interacted with and was influenced by many of the German writers who settled in the area during that time, including
Thomas Mann and
Bertolt Brecht. Meanwhile, her mother became addicted to morphine, which had been prescribed by a local physician, and became increasingly dysfunctional. At this time it was difficult for her to renew her
German passport, and staying in Italy without a valid passport or a source of income carried the risk of being deported to Germany. Aldous Huxley's wife Maria came up with a solution in 1935. Maria is known to have said, on the question of who should marry Sybille, "We need to get one of our bugger friends." 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), whom she described as a friend's "bugger butler", and obtained a British passport. The marriage ended shortly thereafter, but Sybille took her husband's surname, publishing all of her later work as Sybille Bedford. 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. ==Career as a writer==