In the wonderful Trekkie Ritchie Parsons Dustwrapper.

SACKVILLE-WEST, Vita ~ All Passion Spent

FIRST UK PRINTING. The Hogarth Press, London: 1931

8vo., pale green cloth lettered in gilt to backstrip; in the exceptional dustwrapper priced 7/6 net to spine, featuring a design by Trekkie Ritchie Parsons with flowers in a vase overlooking windows and a countryside scene; THE BOOK near-fine, aside from very mild bubbling to the spine and bruises to tips; the odd spot to the fore-edge; sticker of Emily Mundy's Bookshop to rear paste-down; THE WRAPPER also excellent, very good to near fine, a touch toned along the backstrip with some chipping mostly affecting head, but not titles; compeltely unrestored. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First UK edition, first printing. Arguably Vita Sackville-West's masterpiece, 'All Passion Spent' has sometimes been described as a fictional companion piece to Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own'. In it, an elderly aristocrat Deborah, Lady Slane, attempts to embrace freedom after the death of her husband. Looking back on her life and her aspirations before marriage, she chooses to escape to a rented house in Hampstead where, to the surprise of everyone, she revels in her new-found freedom, stating, famously "I am going to become completely self-indulgent. I am going to wallow in old age." A novel which confounds many of the stereotypical views of the elderly in Literature, Sackville-West explores the possibility of living to one's own desires, even late in life. While her friend and lover Virginia Woolf once, years early, described the necessity of women taking 'a room of one's own', Sackville-West now depicts one such woman taking full advantage of that new-found freedom. A "funny and enchanting book" Joanna Lumley, who provided the foreword to a later edition wrote, "she follows her heart and memories. It makes growing old make sense.” Trekkie Ritchie Parsons was an English lithographer and artist who later became the lover of Leonard Woolf. It was between the two World Wars that she was introduced to the Woolfs through her sister, Alice, and she produced several dust jackets for publications from their Hogarth Press, of which this particular book is perhaps one of her more famous. Seldom found in such superior condition.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Near Fine