All Passion Spent.
Inscribed on publication day to her mother-in-law: Harold’s “Mummy”
Sackville-West, Vita. All Passion Spent. London: The Hogarth Press, 1931.
8vo.; grey cloth, spine stamped in gilt, spine browned. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of her best-known novel. A presentation copy, inscribed on the official publication date on the front endpaper: For Harold’s Mummy, from Vita. May 27, 1931. A wonderful association copy: Vita’s widowed mother-in-law, Lady Carnock, inspired the heroine of All Passion Spent, Lady Slane. Vita never warmed to Harold’s “mummy,” though, and in 1944 wrote to her husband resentfully of her dependence and demands: “She is a damned selfish grasping old woman, that’s what she is…I hate your mummy, I hate her, I hate her, I hate her. I don’t care if she is 84. I wish she was dead.” Glendinning writes, “There is a connection between the ideas of All Passion Spent and those of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, which was conceived in 1931 thought not published until 1938.
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