All Passion Spent (VMC)

Product Information

Remake of the 1961 Disney comedy about separated identical twins who meet at camp, change places and hatch a plot to reunite their divorced parents.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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.It was the first book by this author that I have read and I expected it to be more dated than it was.

To this place of retirement her own children might come occasionally, but no grandchildren, and certainly not the great-grandchildren. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. Nevertheless, by allowing Lady Slane to reflect on how her life had got her to where she was, Sackville-West intentionally gives us enough information to draw our own conclusions. Lady Slane astounds them when she reveals she has made her own plans and has absolutely no need of their help at all. Her children, all over sixty, have planned for her to spend her remaining days quietly, as a paying guest of each of them in turn.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. You would need to give full and clear credit to “Karen Heenan-Davies, Book Talk” with links to the original content.

All the parts of her that were not Henry Holland's had pulled in opposition, yet by this single giant of love they had all been pulled over, as the weaker team in a tug-of-war. When a driven doctor doesn't get the prestigious position she planned for, she unexpectedly finds herself moving to a remote Alaskan town. Right at the end, and it’s a bit neat, her great grand-daughter Deborah, engaged to a Duke, bursts in, lays her head on Lady Slane’s knee and sobs that she has broken the engagement and is going to be a pianist. It is always better to read, though, and you’ve convinced me not to let this one go by for another year.Maybe sticking to our decisions to live the gentle, quiet lives we dream of, instead of jumping through hoops, is really a bold leap out of the comfort zone of public approval.

After Lady Slane moves, we meet people, in addition to her equally elderly maid Genoux, we do like, namely Mr. And I get fed up with negative portrayals of older women – it really grates on me (particularly as I’m not getting any younger myself).The film of Orlando with Tilda Swinton is really good, and that’s an amazing book, but I’ve also loved all of Vita’s I’ve read, plus her pieces on gardening, of course. All Passion Spent is short in pages, but dense in thought-provoking passages and situations; love or despise the characters as we may, we find many parallels, often unexpected, between this upper-class “lady” with few “real” problems, and our own less exalted lives.