All Passion Spent (original 1931; edition 1983)

Vita Sackville-West was the great friend (lover) of Virginia Woolf, and this book explores themes similar to those in Woolf's A Room of One's Own. It's beautifully written, totally engaging, and even though it was published in 1931, inspiring and relevant.

Here, the "admirably dutiful" life of eighty-eight year old Lady Slane is examined. For decades she has remained an exemplary wife to her statesman husband, and splendid mother to her children... now well into middle age themselves. Her own youthful dreams of being an artist have been forgotten in the expectation of others, and of society.

Now, in widowhood, Lady Slane quietly, gently and resolutely defies expectations. She declines the plans her six rather pompous children have made for her and takes a small but charming house in Hampstead, where she chooses to live independently and free from her past -- to enjoy, as she says, repose.

In this small house, which echoes much of the Bloomsbury occupations of gardening, art and domesticity, Lady Slane lives with Genoux, her French maid and is visited by Mr. Bucktrout, her house agent, who believes his mathematical calculations reveal the imminent end of the world; a coffin maker who imagines what people might look like dead in order to discern their true character, and Mr. FitzGeorge, an eccentric millionaire collector who fell in love with Lady Slane many years ago in India.

Amidst this collection of eccentrics Lady Slane examines her past, recalls the dreams of her youth and at last, with one last "strange and lovely thing," acts upon the passion she abandoned seventy years earlier to the narrow conventions of a proper Victorian marriage.

A woman's freedom to choose is, Sackville-West shows us, what allows her to fully realize her own life. ( )

Lady Slane faces life not as wife of Lord Slane but as herself for the first time since her marriage 60 years before; slight book, but clear and complete character sketch

Little old lady tries, at last, to make her own life after a lifetime of looking after other people's interests and especially her children. Of course, this only rings true if you are from the class of the little old lady or the author - exactly how much 'looking-after' does the Vicereine of India do? She is once described as arranging flowers though - onerous duties indeed. So here we have a deluded, very wealthy old bat who buys a house in Hampstead and has only one servant in order that she may fulfil her childhood ambition of being an artist, although she's never even produced a drawing and never will. She is courted by a very wealthy old man who once fell in love with her (when she was arranging flowers) who pops off leaving her his priceless collection of gewgaws instead of the museums and art galleries who are panting for such marvellous freebies to own for themselves.

So what does she do, well she gives away all the money and collections not because she is charitable old bat and doesn't need funds anyway, no, she does it because she is a real bitch, no matter how softly-spoken, so she can dispossess her rapacious children.

Eventually, persuaded by the maid and her lawyer, she does feel guilty about such a thing, but there you go, the wages of sin and all that. Eventually she pops off too and that's that.

Good read, well-written, set in a time and by an author who could not imagine anything much outside her realm of extreme privilege and where poor was only being able to afford a tiny house in a very posh area with only one servant.



( )

This is a beautifully written story about a woman who lived most of her life living for others and suppressing all that was real in her personality. After the death of her husband when she was 88 years old she did manage to get away on her own. She bought a house where she could spent her waning time in peace and contemplation. I don't know why the author couldn't have made her 78 years old instead of leaving her with the dregs of her life when she really was feeble. I found that while she appeared selfless there were aspects of her life wherein she was utterly selfish. She had a french maid who came to her when she married and staid for about 70 years. The fact that this close companion was never seen as an individual who was also very ancient and given a retirement tells me more about the character of Lady Slane than anything else. ( )

It’s a quiet, beautifully told vignette of a woman’s last year of life. She had dreamt of being a painter, and retains an artist’s eye, but subsumed hers. I was disappointed with the outcome, I wanted this woman to pick up her brushes and create something, or at least accept the love an old flame had given her. ( )