'I love the world - the Mediterranean, the countryside, friends, wine and food, architecture, art, the riches of life. Why else does one write or paint, except to try to hold a little of that?'

Born into German aristocracy with a Jewish family background, Sybille Bedford lived through two world wars and married a gay Englishman to escape Nazi persecution. She had to wait until she was forty-one to have her first book published, but her work - including the modern classic novels Jigsaw and A Legacy - went on to secure her reputation as one of the most original and exacting prose stylists of the twentieth century.

This carefully edited selection of letters shows that extraordinary writer like never before. Spanning the 1930s to the 1980s, the correspondence follows her across France, wartime America, Italy, Mexico, and London.

Often written on the move, these letters, impulsively scratched onto thin, green typing paper, capture a life never fully anchored in one place. They show a great writer wrestling with self-doubt, sloth and ill-health. But, above all, they tell the story of her great loves.

With an insatiable appetite for love and sex, much of Sybille Bedford's correspondence is addressed to three women with whom she had romantic relationships. As she used to say, she would have written more, had she loved less.

Full of warmth, affection, honesty and wit, Please, Do Write offers a window into the life and work of a writer - and a woman - in transit.