18. All Passion Spent

Vita Sackville-West
Rated C

Blurb from back of book "Having surrendered of her life to the exemplary, if often hollow fulfillment of her marriage, to the expectations of her statesman 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."

After reading the first few pages of this book I was entirely in sympathy with Lady Slane as she declares her independence from her pompas and patronizing children. However by the time I finished this book the only characters I liked were the landlord, the handyman and the french maid. As I read it slowly dawned on me that Lady Slane had a mean streak that had remained hidden under her personna of gentle, scatterbrained and submissive wife and dedicated Mother.