All Passion Spent [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Vita Sackville-West began writing All Passion Spent in the spring of 1930. Her title could hardly be less applicable to her own situation at the time: at thirty-eight, she was at the height of her energies. She had just bought the romantic ruins of Sissinghurst Castle, though she and her husband Harold Nicolson were not to live there full-time for another couple of years; and she had just finished correcting the proofs of The Edwardians^ which turned out to be a great popular success. In the year that she worked on her new novel she was spending all her spare time at Sissinghurst, clearing the rubble and rubbish of decades from what was to be the famous garden, and supervising the builders. She also wrote a long poem, "Sissinghurst", which expressed the deep significance to her of this new commitment. Always a person for whom places were at least as important as people, and with this new passion for Sissinghurst dominating her daily life, it is not surprising that a house plays such a large part in All Passion Spent. The novel was published by the Woolfs' Hogarth 173