All Passion Spent Author:V. Sackville-West Echoing the themes in A Room of Ones Own by her great friend Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West remaps the destiny of the gentle, gracious eighty-eight-year-old Lady Slane in this classic modern novel. Having surrendered seven decades of her life to the exemplary, if often hollow fulfillment of her marriage, to the expectations of her sta... more »tesman husband and the demands of her children, Lady Slane finally, in her widowhood, defies her family. She dismisses the wishes and plans of her six pompous sons and daughters for her future, and instead retires to a tiny house in Hampstead, where she chooses to live independently and free from her past. There she alters, and not without some success, the course of her personal history. There, too, she recollects the dreams of her youth and at last, with one last strange and lovely thing, acts upon the passion she forfeited seventy years earlier to the narrow conventions of a proper Victorian marriage. ...Sackville-West has borrowed in her prose writing some ... function of poetry, the ability to suggest far more than she says.New York Times Witty and charming and graceful and brilliant.Chicago Tribune« less
ISBN-13: 9780881847949 ISBN-10: 0881847941 Publication Date: 12/1991 Edition:Rep/Mv Tie Rating:
I found both the prose and the story of this unusual novel very enjoyable. It was refreshing to read this book, and I can see why PBS presented an adaptation of it on TV. Good, thoughtful read.