SYBILLE BEDFORD was a distinguished novelist, a literary journalist, a law reporter, a travel writer and a biographer of Aldous Huxley. Although she eventually settled in London in the 1960s, she was thoroughly cosmopolitan, a characteristic always reflected in her work.

Born in Charlottenburg, the suburb of Berlin, in 1911, she spent her early years with her father, after her beautiful, feckless mother ran off with a lover. Sybille and her father, Maximilian von Schoenebeck, a minor German aristocrat, lived in some poverty, camping on the run-down estate of a disused schloss in a rural area near the Alsace border. There, despite struggling to feed themselves, they were able to take advantage of the remains of a fine cellar and, while still a child, Sybille developed a passion for good wine.

Her father died suddenly in the 1920s, and she was left at the mercy of her uncaring mother, whom she followed around Italy, France and Britain. Her mother was involved in anti-fascist activities, and as a teenager Bedford carried copies of the New Statesman, hidden under her pinafore, in her travels about prewar Europe. Eventually her mother moved her and her half-sister to Sanary-sur-Mer, a fishing village near Toulon.

Bedford received no formal education — she was never even taught how to hold a pen and always regretted not being able to read her own handwriting. It was only when she was finally abandoned by her mother — who, jilted by her lover, had become addicted to alcohol and morphine — that she found a more settled existence.

At Sanary she mingled with an interesting collection of literary types which, after 1933, was swollen by a wave of refugee German writers, including Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Toller and Julius Meier-Graefe. They were her “mentors, examples, seducers and friends”.

Most importantly, it was at Sanary that she met Aldous and Maria Huxley, whom she considered her real teachers as well as close friends. Huxley inspired her to write in English, for although she claimed that as soon as she could speak she had wanted to be a writer, she had always vacillated between using French (and being like her favourite, Stendhal) or English. Formal, unbending German had been ruled out from the start.

Her biography of Aldous Huxley, published in two volumes in 1973 and 1974, is perceptive and affectionate. It describes their time in France together: how on one occasion Sybille was left in charge of Huxley while his wife was away and how she took them both to Berlin in her ancient and unreliable car.

On their return to London in 1935, the Huxleys took a flat in Albany, and Sybille was installed, rent-free, in one of the servants’ attics allotted to every flat. At first the “Gentleman Trustee” objected to the use of a typewriter, on the ground that it smacked of trade, but he was mollified by Huxley’s promise that she would use it only for poetry.

As a German national living in Britain during the Second World War, she was in need of a more congenial nationality, and the Huxleys decided that “we must get one of our b****r friends to marry Sybille”. She became a British citizen by marrying Walter Bedford, but the union did not last long and in later years she was reticent about it. Indeed, despite leading a colourful life — not least in matters of the heart — and having known and mixed with literary and criminal Europe for the best part of a century, she always retained a remarkably low profile.

Even in her two most overtly autobiographical works, the highly acclaimed Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education (1989), which was shortlisted for the Booker prize, and Quicksands: A Memoir (2005), Bedford remained discreet. She omitted many intimate names, such as those of her parents and of her lovers of both sexes (only in Quicksands, published when she was in her nineties, was her relationship with women clarified). Both books consist of long, unfixed histories which revisit much of the material covered in her other writings. Yet, there is no indulgence in her books; they are written grandly and with maturity — her first book came out when she was already 42.

During her twenties and thirties Bedford had had three books rejected for publication — for which, she later claimed, she was grateful: they were the work of someone who “had read too much and knew too little”.

She had begun writing — essays, novels and criticism — at 16, but her first book was published only in 1953. This was The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey, a travel book written before such things were fashionable. It is a charming, animated and very funny account of her time in Mexico and was the product of her need after the war to be in a country “with a long, nasty history in the past and as little present history as possible”. It was republished as A Visit to Don Otavio in 1960 and was chosen for the Best of British Travel Books’ promotion in 1984.

All Bedford’s works of fiction overlap — a trait of which she was mindful. Jigsaw, which she called a “biographical novel”, was at the same time a sequel of sorts to her first work of “fiction”, A Legacy (1956), explaining some characters, adding memories.