Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
High Romance
By Gabriele Annan
Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education
by Sybille Bedford
Knopf, 328 pp., $18.95
Sybille Bedford calls her new book a biographical novel. At first glance, it seems simply her autobiography up to the age of twenty. Bedford is an English writer living in England, but she was born of a German father, Maximilian von Schoenebeck, in 1911. These facts come from Who's Who; the rest from Jigsaw. Her father belonged to the Catholic minor nobility of Baden; her mother was half Jewish. She was his second wife; the first, completely Jewish, had died young. In those days rich, well brought-up Jewish girls rather expected to marry into the aristocracy. What happened when they did is a principal theme in Bedford's most successful novel, A Legacy (1956). It is really more of a 'biographical novel' than Jigsaw, which most people would call autobiographical, though both cover some of the same ground.
Review, 2344 words
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