All Passion Spent [Paperback]

Irreverently funny and surprisingly moving,All Passion Spentis the story of a woman who discovers who she is just before it is too late.

After the death of elder statesman Lord Slane—a former prime minister of Great Britain and viceroy of India—everyone assumes that his eighty-eight-year-old widow will slowly fade away in her grief, remaining as proper, decorative, and dutiful as she has been her entire married life. But the deceptively gentle Lady Slane has other ideas. First she defies the patronizing meddling of her children and escapes to a rented house in Hampstead. There, to her offspring’s utter amazement, she revels in her new freedom, recalls her youthful ambitions, and gathers some very unsuitable companions—who reveal to her just how much she had sacrificed under the pressure of others’ expectations.“An elegant, surprising, still inspiring novel.” —Sunday Telegraph(UK)VITA SACKVILLE-WEST (1892-1962) was a writer and poet born in England to aristocratic parents. In 1913, she married diplomat Harold Nicolson and traveled extensively before settling in 1930 at Sissinghurst Castle, where she designed a world-famous garden. Sackville-West had an affair with Virginia Woolf and was the model for the protagonist of Woolf’sOrlando.She is best known for her novels, includingThe EdwardiansandAll Passion Spent.Henry Lyulph Holland, first Earl of Slane, had existed for so long that the public had begun to regard him as immortal. The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognise extreme old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man’s initial handicaps: the brevity of life. To filch twenty years from eternal annihilation is to impose one’s superiority on an allotted programme. So small is the scale upon which we arrange our values. It was thus wilÓH