2017/15 All Passion Spent: Vita Sackville-West (1931) *****

Book recommendations are a mixed blessing. We don't always agree and book reviews that are puffs for friends and contacts can be particularly disappointing. I can't track down who enthused about this book in the last couple of years but they were on the money. I tend to a be a bit negative about The Bloomsbury Group, finding their privileged and self-indulgent carry on a bit off-putting. I was not persuaded by my sole excursion into Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Experimental, yes, but also irritating. This book is altogether different: charming, witty and subversive but also tender in its celebration of the friendships that sustain people who find their families unsympathetic and difficult.

Vita Sackville West began the book in the Spring of 1930, just after buying Sissinghurst. Her life must have been filled with the demands of a run-down large house and gardens and she still found time to write a novel. By contrast, 88-year old Lady Slane longs for a very small house in Hampstead that she had seen thirty years before. This becomes possible on the death of her husband, the chillingly narcissistic Earl of Slane who has been Prime Minister, Viceroy of India and a much-travelled diplomat. Lady Slane decides to move, allowing her to have as little as possible to do with her children and grandchildren. Her husband had built his career on charm but he clearly only cared for himself. Having married quite young, her hoped-for life as an artist was dutifully set aside in favour of a good match and she diligently provided children and supported his life of public service.

In her excellent introduction Victoria Glendinning says that Vita was bitter about the way that women in particular were distorted by society and prevented from developing their true selves. Lady Slane takes her revenge by bequeathing a vast and unexpected legacy to the nation and out of the hands of her grasping children. All Passion Spent is a title that suggests a dispiriting after time. But this is not the tenor of the novel. It is a charming and poignant book about finding peace in this late stage of life. I am pleased not to have missed it. I look forward to reading The Edwardians, her sensational tale of the rich and their rackety house parties in the lull before the Great War. I might even give Virginia Woolf's Orlando a go since it was inspired by Vita.