All Passion Spent

All Passion Spent tells the marvellously cheering story of how, in widowhood, a conventional woman is finally able to defy her family * Guardian *Sackville-West writes simply wonderfully and many passages make me laugh out loud – Joanna LumleyHeartening * Observer *Inspiring… Old age can be celebrated, not feared * Sunday Telegraph *Every page of this novel is a pleasure to read * The Times *Behind its lyrical prose is the idea of how important it is to lay claim to your own space, however late in life * Spectator *Sackville-West’s wickedly funny All Passions Spent is her best novel by a mile… Superb * WI Life *A moving portrait of an old age in which something of the potential self can be recovered… Superb. – Jackie Wilkin * WI Life *It’s the ideal moment for those not acquainted with her work to read this engaging, memorable novel… Written in engaging prose that is crisp and witty and hums with vitality… it tells us the important truth that life can begin again at eighty-eight. – Stephen Joyce * Nudge *

Vita Sackville-West was born in 1892 at Knole in Kent, the only child of aristocratic parents. In 1913 she married diplomat Harold Nicolson, with whom she had two sons and travelled extensively before settling at Kent’s Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, where she devoted much of her time to creating its now world-famous garden. Throughout her life Sackville-West had a number of other relationships with both men and women, and her unconventional marriage would later become the subject of a biography written by her son Nigel Nicolson. Though she produced a substantial body of work, amongst which are writings on travel and gardening, Sackville-West is best known for her novels The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), and for the pastoral poem The Land (1926), which was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. Sackville-West died on 2 June 1962 at her Sissinghurst home, aged seventy.