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A review by bethadele
All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West
5.0
My adoration of Vita is no secret.
And my love for her dims not. Her wit and inventiveness, both strong in All Passions Spent, tend to be slightly overshadowed by her tenderness and a certain kind of brutality that she slowly unwinds simultaneously in a tale that takes a dig at the social conventions that threatened to suffocate and consume women of the era and examining how well we truly know those closest to us and at times, indeed, even ourselves.
When the enigmatic Lord Henry Sloan (former Prime Minister and Viceroy of India) takes his final breath, the couples six children descend on their home in an effort to protect and manage their mother in her final days. Lady Sloan, however, has other plans. What happens next makes for a bemusing tale. One can't help but feel elated at Lady Sloan's ability to irritate and confound her children. For once, mistress of her own destiny, Lady Sloan opts to live her days alone with a small cast of eccentric and peculiar companions that bring a richness to her life that she had been craving for years.
It's refreshing to read about a protagonist living out the final scenes of her life. So much of life is focused on youth. But as Mr. FitzGeorge notes on p122 "the face of youth is an unwritten page", but an old face, an old face is full of the richness of life and there is a beauty in the stories it can tell that the youthful have not yet attained.
Vita's disdain for convention is well known. So it's no surprise that All Passion Spent is a cautionary tale of the dangers of allowing others to assume they know you, to allow them to take the drivers wheel and navigate the route of your life. The wastefulness of being the supporting role in your own tale instead of the heroine. But all is not lost. It is never too late to pull over and demand to take back the wheel.
The conflict is in the subjugation, the hope is in the casting off of the shackles, the tragedy is not doing so sooner.
Lady Sloan dies reasonably content. She has lived a life, not always entirely her own, but one that at it's end is entirely hers.
There is a lot of food for thought here. The wonder of how well do we really know those closest to us? How well do we really know ourselves? And what if we came to the closing chapters of our own lives to discover all our passions were spent on others with nothing left for ourselves?
And my love for her dims not. Her wit and inventiveness, both strong in All Passions Spent, tend to be slightly overshadowed by her tenderness and a certain kind of brutality that she slowly unwinds simultaneously in a tale that takes a dig at the social conventions that threatened to suffocate and consume women of the era and examining how well we truly know those closest to us and at times, indeed, even ourselves.
When the enigmatic Lord Henry Sloan (former Prime Minister and Viceroy of India) takes his final breath, the couples six children descend on their home in an effort to protect and manage their mother in her final days. Lady Sloan, however, has other plans. What happens next makes for a bemusing tale. One can't help but feel elated at Lady Sloan's ability to irritate and confound her children. For once, mistress of her own destiny, Lady Sloan opts to live her days alone with a small cast of eccentric and peculiar companions that bring a richness to her life that she had been craving for years.
It's refreshing to read about a protagonist living out the final scenes of her life. So much of life is focused on youth. But as Mr. FitzGeorge notes on p122 "the face of youth is an unwritten page", but an old face, an old face is full of the richness of life and there is a beauty in the stories it can tell that the youthful have not yet attained.
Vita's disdain for convention is well known. So it's no surprise that All Passion Spent is a cautionary tale of the dangers of allowing others to assume they know you, to allow them to take the drivers wheel and navigate the route of your life. The wastefulness of being the supporting role in your own tale instead of the heroine. But all is not lost. It is never too late to pull over and demand to take back the wheel.
The conflict is in the subjugation, the hope is in the casting off of the shackles, the tragedy is not doing so sooner.
Lady Sloan dies reasonably content. She has lived a life, not always entirely her own, but one that at it's end is entirely hers.
There is a lot of food for thought here. The wonder of how well do we really know those closest to us? How well do we really know ourselves? And what if we came to the closing chapters of our own lives to discover all our passions were spent on others with nothing left for ourselves?