On the marriage of Julius von Felden and Melanie Merz, the fortunes of two
families are somewhat fatally entwined. In A Legacy, Sybille Bedford
depicts their vastly different worlds - the wealthy bourgeois life of the
Merzes in Berlin and the aristocratic eccentricity of the von Felden
dynasty in rural Baden. Portrayed with exquisite wit and acute observation,
their personal upheavals and tragedies are set against the menacing
backdrop of a newly unified Germany combined with Prussian militarism in
the decades before the First World War.