All Passion Spent (VMC)

Product Information

Even in my limited corner of the blogosphere people are saying in almost the same breath: I never read SF/I loved Handmaiden.

By joining TV Guide, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. A very smart copy of the first edition of one of Sackville-West's best known, and most loved, novels.Now I have reread it thirty years later and am still enchanted by the study of a family stripped bare of their values by the honesty of their Victorian mother/grandmother/ great grandmothers review of a life well lived but based on a contractual lie that undermines the whole of Lady Slanes life. 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.

Kay lives alone with his collection of astrolabes and instruments; his only friend is Mr FitzGeorge. 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. She relives youthful events, reviews her life, and considers life's influences and controls, happiness and relationships. Platitudes such as 'step out of your comfort zone' are so prevalent, we tend to take them on board as dogma without ever thinking about them. The comfort that the two of them experience in their talk at the end of the book is Lady Slane’s last bit of happiness on the earthly plane, and would seem a fitting close to a remarkable life — frustrated and then reclaimed after hearts less stout would have proclaimed it too late.Contents are very good - clean and bright with minor rubbing of colour from boards to edges of pastedowns and endpapers. Lady Slane, after all, has the means and space at last to think about herself and to piece her life together as she faces its end. In contemplation she could pierce to a happier life more truly than her children, who reckoned things by results and activities.

First published in 1931, All Passion Spent is the fictional companion to her friend Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

I bought rather a lot of them in the 1980s, and they were often on my want-lists, but I haven’t bought many lately. All the while she suffers through the complaints of her children who feel she is spending their inheritance. 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. By coincidence, the next book I started reading was also a 1930s discussion about women working or not working, so I have framed my review as a comparison with All Passion Spent.