All passion spent - V. Sackville-West

When Lady Slane was young, she nurtured a secret, burning ambition: to become an artist. She became, instead, the dutiful wife of a great statesman, and mother to six children. In her widowhood she finally defies her family. 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. Much to their dismay, Lady Slane rents a small house in Hampstead and chooses to live independently, free from her past. She revels in her new-found freedom, living the life she forfeited seventy years earlier to the conventions of a Victorian marriage, and attracts an odd assortment of companions. Among them is Mr FitzGeorge, an eccentric millionaire who met her in India, when she was very young and very lovely?.?.?.

First published in 1931, All Passion Spent is the fictional companion to her friend Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.