Life was that lake, thought Lady Slane, sitting under the warm south wall amid the smell of peaches; a lake offering its even surface to many reflections, gilded by the sun, silvered by the moon, darkened by a cloud, roughened by a ripple; but level always, a plane, keeping its bounds, not to be rolled up into a tight, hard ball, small enough to be held in the hand, which was what people were trying to do when they asked if one’s life had been happy or unhappy.
Leonard Woolf — who was Vita Sackville-West’s publisher at Hogarth Press — called All Passion Spent her best novel, and it’s kind of hard to talk about this book without talking about the Woolfs. Sackville-West began writing this in 1930, while in a relationship with Virginia Woolf (a period considered the artistic peak of each of the women due to their positive influence on one another), and not only would Woolf base the main character of Orlando on the androgynous Sackville-West, but All Passion Spent has been called the fictionalisation of the ideas in Woolf’s extended essay A Room of One’s Own. To that end: All Passion Spent is about an eighty-eight-year old woman, newly widowed, who, after seventy years of supporting her husband’s illustrious career and domestic happiness (at the sacrifice of her own artistic ambitions), decides, to her children’s horror, to retire to some rooms of her own and live out her days as she pleases. This novel is philosophically sophisticated as the Lady Slane considers her life and its meaning and it is gently humorous as the underestimated old woman takes her pompous children down a peg or two. Not a long read, there’s a lot to this and I found it all delightful.
Of course, she would not question the wisdom of any arrangements they might choose to make. Mother had no will of her own; all her life long, gracious and gentle, she had been wholly submissive — an appendage. It was assumed that she had not enough brain to be self-assertive. “Thank goodness,” Herbert sometimes remarked, “Mother is not one of those clever women.”
After the death of their eminent father (onetime Viceroy of India, British Prime Minister, peer of the realm), the six Holland children — “old, black ravens”, not one below sixty — gathered to decide what to do about Mother. After determining that they would sell the family home and use the proceeds to offset the costs of shifting her around between them, they were flabbergasted to discover that Mother had her own ideas, and indeed, had already set in motion a plan to go see a man about a small house in Hampstead she had admired thirty or so years earlier. Moving there with just the French maid (only two years younger than Her Ladyship) who had served her throughout her marriage, and with instructions for the children to not visit too often (and for her exhausting grand- and great-grandchildren not to visit at all), Lady Slane settles into a life of contented contemplation. She makes a couple of unlikely new friends (her landlord and an eccentric associate of her son’s who had known the Vicereine in India), and the walks that they take around Hampstead Heath — the setting for all their best conversations — apparently echo the frequent walks that Vita and Virginia took upon those same pathways as they discussed the ideas that would become their most famous works.
Sackville-West insisted that she was not a feminist (stressing that women’s rights were human rights and universal human rights were what interested her), and in this novel that is more about ideas than plot, she gives her characters some very interesting conversations about privilege and duty and being true to oneself:
“You really mustn't talk as though my life had been a tragedy. I had everything that most women would covet: position, comfort, children, and a husband I loved. I had nothing to complain of — nothing.”
“Except that you were defrauded of the one thing that mattered. Nothing matters to an artist except the fulfilment of his gift. You know that as well as I do. Frustrated, he grows crooked like a tree twisted into an unnatural shape. All meaning goes out of life, and life becomes existence — a makeshift. Face it, Lady Slane. Your children, your husband, your splendour, were nothing but obstacles that kept you from yourself. They were what you chose to substitute for your real vocation. You were too young, I suppose, to know any better, but when you chose that life you sinned against the light.”
For her own part, Sackville-West refused to sin against the light: Entered into an open marriage (that allowed her and her husband to pursue same-sex relationships as they pleased), Vita refused to play the role of smiling hostess in support of her husband’s diplomatic and political careers; insisting on an independent life of her own to pursue her writing and gardening and love affairs. Although she does not judge Lady Slane too harshly here for the conventional roles that she assumed, All Passion Spent ends on the hopeful note of a great-granddaughter who decides to break her engagement, and future hopes of becoming a duchess, in order to pursue her own artistic ambitions. This was a charming and thoughtful novel and I end by acknowledgeing the debt I owe to the Vitas and Virginias who committed to paper an alternative vision of feminine passions and potentiality.
