Then Lady Slane shocks them with her announcement she will take a house in Hampstead, an expression of unexpected independence that most of them see as a bit of senility. Sitting there in the sun at Hampstead, in the late summer, under the south wall and the ripened peaches, doing nothing with her hands, she remembered the day she had become engaged to Henry. Among them is Mr FitzGeorge, an eccentric millionaire who met her in India, when she was very young and very lovely? There are flashbacks to her earlier life and perceptive thoughts about women's freedom -- or lack of -- during this period. In Hampstead, Lady Slane becomes the bright star in a small constellation of elderly men: the estate agent and owner of the home, the man who renovates the house, and a man who has loved her quietly from afar for over sixty years.

At times satirical and at times amusing, All Passion Spent is insightful about the delights of living according to one’s own desires. I need to sharpen up my knowledge of modernism – I think I understand it but then when I try to explain it to someone else (always the true test of knowledge and understanding!Her garden writing is already personally much prized, and frequently referred to in my “working” plant nursery library. Milton defines Samson’s act of heroism as spiritually inspired but also dependent on the physical violence of the crashing pillars. Published in 1931, it is one of Sackville-West's most popular works and has been adapted for television by the BBC. A century after Constable, Lady Slane is attracted to Hampstead because of its distance from the center of power: “Hampstead seemed scarcely a part of London, so sleepy and village-like, with its warm red-brick houses and vistas of trees and distance that reminded her pleasantly of Constable’s paintings.

Seventy years later, released by widowhood, and to the dismay of her pompous children, she abandons the family home for a tiny house in Hampstead. The author was trying to highlight loneliness in society and she had a young character who was lonely too, but the depiction of a woman as being ‘old’ at 75 really grated for me, even though the author is a doctor mining her experience of patients and apparently the story is based on an aunt of hers. Her husband having just passed away, she’s already well into in her eighties but determined to live out her remaining days to their fullest. So she became instead the wife of “a great man”, the perfect consort of the Viceroy of India and Prime Minister of Britain. The poet, novelist, and gardener Vita Sackville-West was not yet forty when she wrote her novel, All Passion Spent, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1931 and reissued by Virago in 1983.They had an unconventional marriage, and troughout her life Sackville-West had a number of other relationships with both men and women. There she gathers an odd assortment of companions: the owner of the house Mr Bucktrout; her loyal French maid Genoux and the jack-of-all-trades Mr Gosheron. Lady Slane – and only late in the novel do we learn her given name – is in her late eighties, her six surviving children are in their sixties, her grandchildren are grown up and so are her oldest great-grandchildren. The comfort that the two of them experience in their talk at the end of the book is Lady Slane’s last bit of happiness on the earthly plane, and would seem a fitting close to a remarkable life — frustrated and then reclaimed after hearts less stout would have proclaimed it too late. But what if she rotated among the married couples, spending time with each as a kind of paying guest?