All Passion Spent (VMC)

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Mr Bucktrout, Lady Slane's old landlord, is also quite a character on her own wavelength, and some of his quotes are the ones I liked most. Of course, most of us have no Genoux to care for our less delectable functions, to wash and dress us, and minister to our ever-more-demeaning physical failings. All Passion Spent is short in pages, but dense in thought-provoking passages and situations; love or despise the characters as we may, we find many parallels, often unexpected, between this upper-class “lady” with few “real” problems, and our own less exalted lives. He was a former Prime Minister and Viceroy of India with an illustrious list of achievements and excellent reputation. Duodecimo, 296 pages, light green cloth, inked 1931 inscription; dj splits at fold of flaps repaired with archival paper tape; chip at head of spine almost affecting the spine title.

There are flashbacks to her earlier life and perceptive thoughts about women's freedom -- or lack of -- during this period.In the first, Lady Slane comes downstairs from viewing for the last time the body of her husband to find her four horrible older children have determined that mother is too vague to live on her own and that they will do their duty, and they may need to be recompensed, by letting her live with each of them a few months at a time. This landscape vision provides Lady Slane with the structure and language she needs to understand her past life—to see the patterns as well as to encircle it as a unified whole. Vitta Sackville West takes you to the main character's inner world and looks at how she really feels about life and her family. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

I have eight or 10 Viragos I bought in a job lot years ago and never got round to reading, well not until this week when one of you, Karen (Booker Talk) talked me into making a start. For a short while we view this scene through the eyes of Edith, the youngest, who may have been an interesting character in her own right, but this is almost the last we see of her. Often classified as an example of feminist literature – the Virginia Woolf parallels and comparisons are de rigueur – this novel transcends that earnest label and is also a very fine piece of story-telling, full of keen observation and humour. Herbert, Carrie, Charles and William are stiff with disapproval; only the awkward family outsider Edith has an inkling that her mother might have more backbone and brain than the others realize; while Kay is most keenly interested in distancing himself from any conflict or fuss; he enjoys his bachelor existence in his flat crowded with his collection of compasses and astrolabes.I have read Portrait of a marriage – back in the 1970s when I read quite a bit ABOUT the Bloomsbury Group – but I haven’t read any of Sackville-West’s novels. They describe blinded Samson, after he has pulled the pillars of the temple down on himself and his enemies, the Philistines, in a final, sacrificial act of heroism. They know their duty but really none of them want her as a permanent fixture in their homes (far too disruptive). Kids don’t like to think of their parents in this way but get especially squirmy when the parents are advanced in years. edition, hardback, 8vo, 294pp, owner's initials dated 1932 on endpaper, edges brownig, otherwise clean and sound, mauve cloth, black titles, spine slightly faded, corners slightly bumped; overalll Very Good condition / no dustwrapper.

At the same time the book observes a family with a sharply humorous eye and death as almost a friend. First published in 1931, All Passion Spent is the fictional companion to her friend Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. These three men, along with Genoux and an unexpectedly appearing great-granddaughter, Lady Slane’s namesake Deborah, bring both confusion and reconciliation to Lady Slane’s mind and soul as she strives to put the meaning of her long life into a final context. This work by Karen Heenan-Davies, and/or BookTalk and Booker Talk blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.

And anyway I’m an autodidact about nearly everything to do with literature, so am perfectly happy to look stuff up.