Synopses & Reviews
Echoing the themes in A Room of One's Own by her great friend Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West remaps the destiny of the gentle, gracious eighty-eight-year-old Lady Slane in this classic modern novel. Having surrendered seven decades of her life to the exemplary, if often hollow fulfillment of her marriage, to the expectations of her statesman husband and the demands of her children, Lady Slane finally, in her widowhood, defies her family. She dismisses the wishes and plans of her six pompous sons and daughters for her future, and instead retires to a tiny house in Hampstead, where she chooses to live independently and free from her past. There she alters, and not without some success, the course of her personal history. There, too, she recollects the dreams of her youth and at last, with one last "strange and lovely thing," acts upon the passion she forfeited seventy years earlier to the narrow conventions of a proper Victorian marriage. "...Sackville-West has borrowed in her prose writing some ... function of poetry, the ability to suggest far more than she says."—New York Times "Witty and charming and graceful and brilliant."—Chicago Tribune
Review
"Sackville-West has borrowed in her prose writing some . . . function of poetry, the ability to suggest far more than she says." New York Times
Review
"Witty and charming and graceful and brilliant." Chicago Tribune
Review
"Shades of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ivy Compton-Burnett. A very gifted writer of fiction." Gay Times
Synopsis
In 1860, as a young girl of 17, Lady Slane nurtures a secret, burning ambitionto become an artist. She becomes, instead, the wife of a great statesman and the mother of 6 children. 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. Here she recollects the dreams of youth, and revels in her newfound freedom with her odd assortment of companions: Genoux, her French maid; Mr. Bucktrout, her house agent; and a coffin maker who pictures people dead in order to reveal their true characters. And then there's Mr. FitzGeorge, an eccentric millionaire who met and loved her in India when she was young and very lovely. It is here in this world of her own that she finds a passion that comes only with the freedom to choose, and it is this, her greatest gift, that she passes on to the only one who can understand its value. First published in 1931, Vita Sackville-West's masterpiece is the fictional companion to her great friend Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.