All Passion Spent - Vita Sackville-West

Last night I went to my monthly book club meeting where we discussed All Passion Spent. It was a depleted group as a lot of people were on holidays, but the conversation was as stimulating as ever.

All Passion Spent is one of Vita Sackville-West's most famous works, and features Lady Slane, an eighty-eight year old recently widowed woman, who, for the first time in her life, is free to do as she wishes. The book opens with the death of her husband, a distinguished politician (former Viceroy of India and former Prime Minister of Britain, no less!) and Lady Slane's children discussing and deciding her future. They all expect her to go along with their plans, but the elderly woman shocks them by taking control and renting herself a small flat of her own in a London suburb, where she lives with her maidservant Genoux.

The best thing about a book club is that you are exposed to so many opinions, and others see things that you didn't even notice. Lady Deborah Slane herself caused a lot of discussion, with some sympathising with her and others being annoyed by her. I must admit I fell into the second camp. Deborah wanted to be an artist in her youth but could not pursue it because she was rushed into marriage, then spent the rest of her life feeling sorry for herself. I felt that a person who has artistic interests will find a way to fulfil it in some way. After all, she led a full and interesting life, travelling to India and Africa and attending glittering functions and soirees. Could she not have found a way to indulge in art in any form with all that life experience to draw from? Equally disappointing, she did not even try to paint when she finally set up independently. I couldn't help feeling she was living in a bubble. Her relationship with her children was also a talking point. A lot of us felt that she was too emotionally distant from her children, finding it scarily easy to cut them from her life. There were instances in the book where she was shown cuddling them as babies, but the impression was that she distanced herself once they grew up and developed persoonalities (in most cases, similar to their father's). But then, perhaps this was a normal feature in middle-class families of the era, when children were mostly raised by nannies and house-staff.

Without exception, we all loved her for indulging in an unconventional and liberated lifestyle in her old age. The relationships and friendships she formed were idiosyncratic and of her own choosing, and all the more poignant for that.

One question that led to a very interesting discussion was that though women have so much more freedom of choice and opportunity than Lady Slane, has anything changed for politicians' wives (as she was)? After all, most politicians' wives have to fit themselves into a mould, indulge in "acceptable" hobbies and causes, and place their own career secondary to their husbands.

Overall, this was an interesting read, even though the language is in places rather stilted (a product of its time) and situations contrived. In all honesty, Sackville-West's own life makes more interesting reading than Lady Slane's, but this is a book worth reading at least once.