Vita Sackville-West : All passion spent

Echoing the themes in A Room of One's Own by her great friend Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West remaps the destiny of the gentle, gracious eighty-eight-year-old Lady Slane in this classic modern novel. Having surrendered seven decades of her life to the exemplary, if often hollow fulfillment of her marriage, to the expectations of her statesman husband and the demands of her children, Lady Slane finally, in her widowhood, defies her family. She dismisses the wishes and plans of her six pompous sons and daughters for her future, and instead retires to a tiny house in Hampstead, where she chooses to live independently and free from her past. There she alters, and not without some success, the course of her personal history. There, too, she recollects the dreams of her youth and at last, with one last "strange and lovely thing," acts upon the passion she forfeited seventy years earlier to the narrow conventions of a proper Victorian marriage. "

 

   

 

I read this novel many years ago, yet couldn't resist re-reading it to see if it was as good as my memory told me.

Maybe not as great as I had found it then, but still a very good novel, a solid 4 stars, that I raised to 4.5 because after all the years that I had read it, I still remembered it fondly. It doesn't happen often.

Maybe it was because Lady Slane was shrugging off almost her whole family, wanting to live peacefully in that little house that she had spotted years ago and still called to her. At the time I first read it, I had two little daughters, a full-time job and lived in a suburbian appartment and depended on public transportation, so I completely identified with the lady !

Not many things happened in this story, it was slow moving, along with its 88 year-old heroin, who gradually found her freedom while contemplating her memories. Nostalgic, then, and quietly on the feminist side.

Lady Slane has a French maid, who speaks mostly French, so make sure to find an edition with translations if you don't speak that language - mine didn't have it, but then, I'm French.

Anyway, I enjoyed it very much and who knows, I might read it again in the future.