All Passion Spent (VMC)

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Highly recommended for its graceful beauty, insights into love and personal independence, and its forward-looking viewpoint.I loved some of the descriptions of Lady Slane's children and thought the author was probably getting back at some of her society acquaintances in these portraits. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Sackville-West redefines heroism in terms of an elderly woman asserting herself and rising to the challenge of, finally, defining herself apart from the others who have claimed her identity. These three men, along with Genoux and an unexpectedly appearing great-granddaughter, Lady Slane’s namesake Deborah, bring both confusion and reconciliation to Lady Slane’s mind and soul as she strives to put the meaning of her long life into a final context.

Henry had treated her well and given her a fine life, she had been Vicereine of India and the wife of the Prime Minister of Great Britain, but every time she had expressed an idea he had paused to listen then passed on, unmoved – “Henry need make no bones about his creed, she must protect hers from shame and ridicule”. This short outline may not seem very promising, but this book has wisdom, wit and psychological understanding and it's very well written - I read it with unflagging interest. She wrote novels, non-fiction, and poetry, including The Land (1926), which won the Hawthorden Prize.Her husband having just passed away, she’s already well into in her eighties but determined to live out her remaining days to their fullest. is quietly evident, in Evelyn for instance, but more often, as I discussed with Sackville-West (here), in putting up the conventional view and allowing us space to form our own criticisms. In contemplation she could pierce to a happier life more truly than her children, who reckoned things by results and activities. These are merely meant to be a measure of the book's success in meeting my hopes and expectations as a reader. This is a novel which confounds the stereotypical portrayals of older people often found in literature.

First Edition, on laid paper; pale green cloth, gilt back, backstrip lightly spotted else a very good, bright, clean, crisp copy.

We’ll do the theory of the author another time, I find it endlessly fascinating – and I suspect I have been slowly changing what I say over the course of this blog. But Lady Slane surprises everyone by escaping to a rented house in Hampstead where she revels in her new freedom, revives youthful ambitions and gathers some very unsuitable companions. The adaptation of Vita Sackville-West's novel stars Wendy Hiller as Lady Slane, an elderly woman whose husband dies. Contents are very good - clean and bright with minor rubbing of colour from boards to edges of pastedowns and endpapers.

The central character, an 88-year-old woman who, towards the end of her life, is emancipated by her husband's death. You could feel the character come to life as she took her own house, chose her friends and made decisions about which family members could see her.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.