I read a little bit about this book before I started reading and I was oddly put off by the description of it. And this is the second time I have checked this out of the library before I started to read it. And I am glad I did, because I enjoyed it a lot, but the discussions about this book as a book do not necessarily serve its interests.
Oddly, Joanna Lumley writes the introduction for this book. Odd in that there’s not a well-known writer or scholar, and there’s not adaptation of this book that she’s in. But her opening comment is something to the effect of “How exciting to start a novel off with a death” and it is!
At the start of this novel we find Lord Slane, the very old and revered–well, Lord, has died. And everyone is quite sad, including his wife Lady Slane. She is very little of the public conversation about the death, a kind of important accessory to his life in public office.
We find out later that she married him when she was very young 16 or 17, and now she is 81, but that as her marriage prospects were being discussed, she also had a keen interest in becoming an artist or having a life dedicated to art.
Coming back to present day, Lady Slane has the opportunity to live her life a little off from expectations. The issue of course is that her children do not wish to respect her choices to live a freer life.
The book is moving because she wasn’t an abused woman now free or particularly mistreated, but she experience a kind of suspended animation of her desire in her roles as wife, mother, and Lady. It’s also funny because at the end she’d pretty fed up.
So the reason I was initially suspect, despite this kind of book being a big part of the books I tend to read, is that it’s described as a fictional exploration of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which I enjoy because of how movingly reasoned it is. I was worried this might lack the heart a novel demands given those kinds of restraints. It didn’t.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/All-Passion-Spent-Vintage-Classics/dp/052543397X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549292635&sr=8-1&keywords=vita+sackville-west)