A primary reading series developed with UCL Institute of Education to help children become confident, independent readers.
A Legacy is the tale of two very different families: the Merzes and the Feldens.
The Jewish Merzes are longstanding members of Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie who count a friend of Goethe among their distinguished ancestors. Not that this proud legacy means much of anything to them anymore. Secure in their huge town house, they devote themselves to little more than enjoying their comforts and ensuring their wealth.
The Feldens are landed aristocracy from Germany’s Catholic south. After Julius von Felden marries Melanie Merz the fortunes of the two families will be strangely, indeed fatally, entwined.
Set during the run-up to World War I, a time of weirdly mingled complacency and angst, A Legacy is captivating, magnificently funny and profound: an unforgettable image of a doomed way of life.
A W&N Essential
The Jewish Merzes are longstanding members of Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie who count a friend of Goethe among their distinguished ancestors. Not that this proud legacy means much of anything to them anymore. Secure in their huge town house, they devote themselves to little more than enjoying their comforts and ensuring their wealth.
The Feldens are landed aristocracy from Germany’s Catholic south. After Julius von Felden marries Melanie Merz the fortunes of the two families will be strangely, indeed fatally, entwined.
Set during the run-up to World War I, a time of weirdly mingled complacency and angst, A Legacy is captivating, magnificently funny and profound: an unforgettable image of a doomed way of life.
A W&N Essential
Reviews
A Legacy lives by its delightful tart and feline wit, and by its author's remarkable gift for capturing the breath of Europe past on the glass of fiction present
If you have never read A Legacy, run out and get it tomorrow
A book of entirely delicious quality . . . Everything is new, cool, witty, elegant, and some scenes are uproariously funny
Simply a masterpiece, idiosyncratic
At once historical novel and study of character, a collection of brilliantly objective portraits
It has the charm of the dying Europe in which it is set
One of the very best novels I have ever read
Her masterwork. Elegant and haunting
A full-blown, extravagant historical novel, replete with the turreted houses and liveried footmen, the loves and betrayals and purloined letters - a murder, too - which customarily enliven that form . . . The bright rushes of talk, the fast, vivid stories of how things were. I don't know of any novel about the early twentieth century that feels more real, as if you could reach out and touch the things in it
A Legacy is Sybille Bedford's magnum opus, and a little harmony has been restored to literature now that it's back again in bookstores
One of the finest and most original prose stylists of her age . . . Darting, confident, brisk, and brittle . . . Each image has been freshly chiselled or rendered with a sparkling and glittering wit
Its beautifully wrought depiction of human life as humorous and harrowing, interconnected and splintering, confused, unjust, and sometimes quite kind extends the legacy of the novel
A joy . . . Dialogue springs with life from the page, and the social and political milieu of a vanished age is brilliantly realised. Bedford is by turns hilarious and ironic in the best sense: compassionate and yet clear-eyed
A Legacy takes the form of a kind of elaborate narrative scrapbook - consisting of fragmentary conversations, dimly recalled anecdotes, and oft-retold family legends interwoven with transcriptions of letters, telegrams, and newspaper accounts . . . The women in particular are arresting, memorable, as Bedford's female characters always are
One of the great books of the twentieth century
