All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West

Who was she, the "I," that had loved? And Henry, who and what was he? A physical presence, threatened by time and death, and therefore the dearer for that factual menace? Or was his physical presence merely the palpable projection, the symbol, of something which might justly be called himself? Hidden away under the symbol of their corporeality, both in him and in her, doubtless lurked something which was themselves. But that self was hard to get at; obscured by the too familiar trappings of voice, name, appearance, occupation, circumstance, even the fleeting perception of self became blunted or confused. And there were many selves. She could never be the same self with him as when she was alone; and even that solitary self which she pursued, shifted, changed, melted away as she approached it, she could never drive it into a dark corner, and there, like a robber in the night, hold it by the throat against the wall, the hard core of self chased into a blind alley of refuge.

Henry Holland, Lord Slane, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Viceroy of India, has died. His vain and mercenary children, themselves quite old, are slavering about the possibility of inheriting his jewels and fretting about where his widow, Lady Slane will go. To their surprise and consternation she rejects their eminently reasonable proposal--to rotate between their households, like the seasons. She's decided, not reasonably, to live on her own in a house in the neighborhood of Hampstead she fell in love with decades ago.

In her new house at Hampstead, Deborah Holland, Lady Slane, lives with the company of other superannuated people: the cantankerous owner of the property Gervase Bucktrout, a humble carpenter named Mr. Gosheron, and a hermit-like art collector, FitzGeorge, who fell in love with her seventy years ago in India, and has now returned to resume a friendship that never really could be kindled. She forbids her great-grandchildren from visiting; she only wants the old, those who understand what she might be going through in her old age, taking on a final measure of independence at the end of her life, reflecting on the way her life has gone.

Lady Slane's life is, though marked by prestige, an exceedingly ordinary life. Though she once dreamed of being an artist, she repressed her own desires for the political ambitions of her husband, whom she married out of expectation. Sackville-West makes it clear that Lady Slane did love her husband and her children, but that this love has never been enough to fully overcome the way that English society is designed to subjugate women: "He merely killed you," FitzGeorge says to Lady Slane about her husband, "that's all. Men do kill women. Most women enjoy being killed; so I am told."

In a long dreamy midsection, Lady Slane imagines herself walking beside the girl she once was, wondering what her life might have become if she had been able to nurture that dream of being an artist. (It seems that she never even got a chance to put brush to paint--she may have been a gifted painter and maybe not, but Sackville-West wants us to see that she never even got past the seed of a dream!) Lady Slane is the embodiment of Virginia Woolf's thesis about women need a "room of one's own," and no wonder: Sackville-West and Woolf had a longstanding romance; Woolf based the protagonist of Orlando on her. Lady Slane hasn't been tortured or miserable, but who knows what she might have become if allowed?

It's no good for Sackville-West to be associated with Woolf; though her novels outsold Woolf's in their lifetime, Woolf's genius will always outshine Sackville-West's talent. Which is a shame, because All Passion Spent is a good novel, perceptive and funny, presenting both psychological complexity (in the reflections of Lady Slane) and broad social comedy (in the vapid selfish banter of her children). It seems tempting to see in its mere existence a confirmation of Lady Slane's experience: Sackville-West and Woolf both managed to wrench an artist's life away from the pressures of expectation, and while Woolf clearly proved to be the genius, there is a remarkable quality to the feat itself.