All Passion Spent

All passion Spent is novel written by Vita Sackville-West in 1931. It tells us the
story of a woman whose life purposes and behaviour were always based on her
husband. Lady Slane was a very rich woman in the inside with many wishes, but at the
age of seventeen, she married Lord Slane, who was a very important politician and a
business man. From that moment onwards, Lady Slane lived her life as she was
supposed to: being a responsible and supportive wife with six children and doing
everything her husband asked her. However, this was until he died when she was
eighty eight.

Due to his death, she had the freedom and independence that were never
allowed to her. “Duty, charity, children, social obligations, public appearance – with
these had her days been filled; and whenever her name was mentioned, the corollary
came quick and slick, ‘such a wonderful help to her husband in his career!” p31. She
did not have to be devoted to him any longer as she had been all her life.
Consequently, she organized her own life, to live it on her own terms and so she went
to Hampstead to live in a significant house.

In addition, she started to think about herself, about her desires and occurred to
her a feeling never felt before. “Lady Slane experience the curious sensation common
to all who remain alone for the first time in an empty house which may become their
home” p 49. Her deepest wish when she was a young lady was to be a painter; such
dream could not be possible since she had to be available to her husband Henry. Yet,
when travelling to the new home, she regretted and missed the fact that she never had
a real talk with him. “[…] there were so many things she would have liked to discuss
with Henry; impersonal things, nothing troublesome” p44.

Furthermore, in her new house in Hampstead, she realized for the first time
what real freedom was about and remembered how different she lived that freedom
during her marriage. “Whatever they did, they did with a fine carelessness, a fine
freedom, and when they came home they need give no account of their doings;
moreover, there was an air of freemasonry among men, based upon their common
liberty, very different from the freemasonry among women” p86. As a result, she was
completely available for herself and nobody else for once in her long life as Henry´s
wife.

Her new beginning as a widow leaded to a different woman questioning about

the happiness and contentment during her existence. “I had everything that most
women would covet: position, comfort, children, and a husband I loved. I had nothing to
complain of – nothing-.”p126. Despite the fact that she had a very wealthy family, as an
old woman she addressed the problem of how to be happy and how important is to be
true to oneself. She also realized that throughout all her life she kept doing things
because it was the correct one to do. She couldn’t achieve her dream of being an artist
but at the end she could see the same seeds of creativity in her great granddaughter
before dying.