Thirty years ago, waiting to take my seat at a dinner at the pen Club in Chelsea, London, I caught sight of an elderly woman quietly installing herself a place or two down on the other side of the long oak table. Though frail and diminutive, there was something rather formidable about this apparition, something steely and self-possessed, and the sense of inner fires steeply banked increased when she reached into her leather satchel, brought out a bottle of wine, decanted some of it expertly into a glass, and began lapping it up like a cat let loose on a saucer of milk. “That,” the person standing next to me murmured, in the manner of one who draws attention to some rare antique run to earth among a shelf full of low-budget curios, “is Sybille Bedford.”

At this stage in her long and eventful life, Bedford (1911–2006) was luxuriating in the success of Jigsaw(1989), which, somewhat implausibly, had been shortlisted for the previous year’s Booker Prize for fiction. The implausibility lay in the book’s autobiographical tendencies—a tethering in the circumstances of the author’s rackety early life in Continental Europe so pronounced that it seemed odd that no judge had wondered whether calling it a novel was an offense against the Trade Descriptions Act for a work whose every other character has an alter ego purposefully at large on the wrong end of the pre-war French Riviera. “I thought, you know, that novelists were supposed to make