All Passion Spent

Vita Sackville-West, the author of All Passion Spent, was more than a simple author-- she was a poet, a novelist, and a gardener. She was the only person to win the Hawthornden Award for poetry twice — first in 1927 and again in 1933 —, was made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature in 1947, and created the elaborate gardens at Sissinghurst Castle, her home later in life where she would one day die at age seventy. Sackville-West used her own background, personal and familial alike, as detail and setting for what would be one of her most successful novels. She came from a wealthy, high class family filled with titles of Lord and Lady, and in 1913, Sackville-West married diplomat Harold Nicolson; she was well-versed in the politics of society, and the games its elite population play. Sackville-West was a highly intelligent and fiercely opinionated woman, and had a wide defiant streak that made itself known not only in how she chose to live her life but also appeared in much of her writing. All Passion Spent centers around the control women do and do not have over their own lives and society’s constrictions. It was published in 1931 by the Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and the cover art of the novel was actually done by Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell.

Author Vita Sackville-West begins her novel by creating for the reader an ambience of the times in the form of a series of old, steeped English traditions while simultaneously using them as points of humor, poking fun at the oddness of it all. “How lucky, she thought, that we all wear so much black habitually, for we certainly could not have got our mourning yet, and how terrible it would have been for Carrie to arrive in a pink shirt;” “What a queer thing appearance was, and how unfair. It dictated the terms of people’s estimate throughout one’s whole life;” and “Herbert was always full of information; and the surprising thing was, for such a stupid man, it was usually correct,” are simply a few examples which powerfully illustrate for the reader the kind of world into which they are stepping.

Sackville-West uses All Passion Spent to address and discuss a range of issues-- all that were relevant and pervasive difficulties in her time, certainly, but many of which are still more problematic today that we would often like to believe. In the beginning of the novel, she has her characters dealing with the layered and hypocritical ways society deals with age, aging, and death. The primary character, the elderly newly-widowed Lady Slane, has five grown children, one of whom remarks to herself, “All these old people, thought Edith, disposing of an older person!” As far as Lady Slane is concerned, all of it, practically every detail in her scenes, is a setting for the unspooling of thread for her and the anti-ageist and anti-misogynist way she was written. When Lady Slane decides to step away from what society and her children expect from a respectable widow, it is noted, “That she might have ideas which she kept to herself never entered into their estimate.” The myriad of shocked and critical responses are unsurprising, given the culture of England in the 1920s. An especially vivid illustration of this is a line of conversation from one of the Lady’s own children: “...After all, we must all remember that her life is shattered. You know that she lived only for Father.” Considering that Lady Slane is, in fact, her own person, who has her own interest as shown throughout the book, this is highly improbable. That assumption, however, is remarkably indicative of the beliefs most commonly held at the time.

A section of the novel, still fairly early on, begins with, “There was such a contrast between what went on inside and what went on outside.” In the narrative they are speaking of the Slane’s house, but it is a very apt metaphor for British society at the time, and in particular this family at the time of the mourning period of the male head of house. Sackville-West’s commentary on the way we treat our elder generations, especially if even the slightest thing is amiss. “They treated her rather as though she had had an accident, or had temporarily gone off her head;” and “The only person to treat her in any normal way Genoux, her old French maid, who was nearly as old as Lady Slane herself, and had been with her the whole of her married life.” The author’s observations of the unique dynamic that can exist between the woman responsible for the home and the staff that work in it is astute and interesting, particularly as such friendships are not one that would be acknowledged or even condoned.

Everyone of high social status is abiding to the rules of convention, barely touching the surface of any situation on any meaningful level; it is the lower class that faces it all head on, wading through the humanity of it all. “They could only insist, implicitly, that their own convention must be adopted:” Everyone is projecting their own ideas of what is right and proper onto the widow, deciding for her how she should mourn and how she should carry on with her life. They don’t even really see her as her own individual. “By her indifference, she was abdicating her position unnecessarily, unbecomingly, soon. She ought, posthumously, for these three or four days, to rally supremely in honour of her husband’s memory; any abrogation of her right was unseemly. So it ran in Herbert’s code…” The degree to which those around Lady Slane are forming judgmental opinions of her actions after the death of her husband increases with direct correlation to how much of her mind she speaks; and as snide as the women can be, it is the men who are most forceful in their pressure to conform. “...But perhaps, chattered the imp in Edith, perhaps she was so thoroughly drained by Father in his lifetime that she can’t now be bothered with his memory?” At this point in the novel, Edith is the only one who come close to seeing Lady Slane and her reaction to these circumstances as they are— she dares to wonder at what lays outside the box, wonders at the imperfections of being the woman in her parents’ marriage and what it means now that her mother is the one left of the two.

Throughout the novel, there are deliberate instances of ceremony and honorifics, posturing and politeness, with the author’s commentary on the ridiculousness of it all. “The two young princes, ushered hurriedly through respectfully to their seats, wondered, perhaps, why fate had isolated them from other young men, by condemning them to cut tape across new arterial roads or to honour statesmen by attending their funerals. More probably, they took it all as part of the day’s work. But where, meanwhile, Edith wondered, was reality?” This little passage about the showmanship of having monarch figures and other symbols of high class and authority do token measures meant to signify their importance is very typical of British culture, even now. And at the end, Edith's question where reality was — noting the difference between what mattered and what was set dressing — is very much Sackville-West’s growing style of commentary.

An immense amount of British customs and cultural structure is made up of that which remains unsaid; social cues and imposed shoulds and should nots. This is a prominent thread throughout All Passion Spent, in a number of varied situations. “Like the papers in Lord Slane’s desk, Lady Slane must be cleared up; then Herbert and Carrie could get back to their business. Nothing not put actually into words could have been conveyed so plainly.” The subtextual form of communication has so much to do with societal conformity and assimilation of the masses; the unspoken commands and signals of what is right, what is proper— the next natural and appropriate step. “Looking at her, one could believe that it was easy for a woman to be beautiful and gracious, as all works of genius persuade us that they were effortless in achievement. [...] Duty, charity, children, social obligations, public appearances -- with these had her days been filled.” Lady Slane is in her sixties, at least, by the time she is widowed, so at this point in her life she has spent over six decades dutifully fulfilling her place in society, doing as she is told and always with poise.

The following is the first scene in which we see Lady Slane truly speak her mind, say what she believes and feels and thinks and stand up to her family and the oppressive views of 'decent' and 'unacceptable' that is the glass jar within which she has lived...“Besides, I have considered the eyes of the world for so long that I think it is time I had a little holiday from them. If one is not to please oneself in old age, when is one to please oneself? There is so little time left!”

Out of Lady Slane, Sackville-West created a symbol for the taken-for-granted, passed-over female figure, the matriarch: “He had taken her so much for granted; they had all taken her so much for granted — her gentleness, her unselfishness, her impersonal activities — and now, for the first time in his life, it was becoming apparent to Kay that people could still hold surprises up their sleeves, however long one had known them.” Her children are finally realizing that she possesses more than the ability to merely shadow the directions of those around her, that there may actually be more to her than they, as her self-absorbed children, have seen. “It now dawned upon Edith that her mother might have lived a full private life, all these years, behind the shelter of her affectionate watchfulness.” Edith is a grown adult, over the age of forty, more thoughtful than the rest of the siblings; it says a great deal that this is still only occurring to her now. Unfortunately, this is all too common, both in the time in which the novel was written and set, and in the present day. Sackville-West gives her heroine a rarity: the opportunities to forge her own way even after years of going along with the assimilated masses. “How oddly it had come about, that the whole of her life should have fallen away her — her activities, her children, and Henry — and should have been so completely replaced in this interlude before the end by a new existence so satisfyingly populated! She supposed that she herself was responsible for its creation, but could not imagine how she had done it.” This passage is pivotal to the characterization of Lady Slane and crucial in the getting the author’s point across, which she does by defying the supposition that life is over when reaches old age, the expectation that by then nothing can change (or should), and certainly not in the direction of positivity.

Sackville-West paints the scene of a much younger Lady Slane with her infant son, sitting on the floor of her nursery surrounded by fresh-cut, rain-wet flowers that she just collected herself, when she is surprised by a family friend who was stopping by the house a little unusually late in the evening...“She had looked up at him, the unexpected visitor, catching her at an employment improbable in a Vicereine. Secretaries or gardeners should have fulfilled this function with which she preferred to deal herself. Her fingers dripping, she had looked up, pushing the hair out of her eyes. But she had pushed something else out of her eyes with the same gesture; she had pushed her whole private life out of them, and had replaced it by the perfunctory courtesy with which she rose, and, giving him her hand, wiping it first on a duster. Said, ‘Oh, Mr. FitzGeorge,’ — she had known his name then, temporarily — ‘do forgive me, I had no idea it was so late.’” It is a gorgeous gem of history of the center character of the novel, showing from a very unique perspective a very intimate moment which tells equally about the viewer and the subject. Additionally, toward the end of this section there is the reminder of the society this is all happening within, one that would direct Lady Slane to dispel any and all exposure of person and privacy.

All Passion Spent is considered by some to be a companion to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The authors were close friends and lovers for twenty years, and both had deep-running belief in and potent opinions on feminism and the entire matter of women in artistic fields such as writing (A Room of One’s Own) and art (All Passion Spent). There is a scene which shows a great deal of Lady Slane’s personality-- her pragmatism, her practicality, and that which she most values: “I don’t want all these valuable things, beautiful though they may be. It would worry me to think that I had upon my mantelpiece a terra-cotta Cellini, which Genoux would certainly break, dusting one morning before breakfast. No, Mr. Bucktrout. I would rather go up on to the Heath, if I want something to look at, and look at Constable’s trees.” Despite the kind of environment in which she not only was raised, but spent the entirety of her adult and married life, her priorities are not materialistic. What she loves is the beauty itself, especially if she can distance it from the messy motivations of mankind.