First published in 1931 this novel, I beg to suggest, is a work of genius. I read it during the summer, very slowly, often rereading the most beautifully crafted sentences and astute perceptions. At 169 pages the novel is short but a model of concision. I am forced to agree with the Times critic quoted on the back cover that, “Every page is a pleasure to read.” All I knew about VSW before this was that she had masterminded that beautiful garden at Sittinghurst Castle and that she enjoyed sleeping with women more than with men. In her own day she outsold Virginia Woolf, her lover, but later fell foul of the Modernist literary movement and became rapidly demoted in the estimation of her peers. What bombastic fools! All of them were men too, it goes without saying.

The novel is not really a story. It is a character study and elegy. It is about old age and dying but it is also about patriarchy and British colonialism and self actualisation. Lady Slane re-evaluates in the days following her husband’s death what she gave up in order to become his wife – the bohemian, insecure but much desired life of a painter. Circumstances conspired to force her to choose “against the light”. VSW observes that “A nun in her novitiate” had been “no more vigilant than she. Drawn tight as a firm wire she had trembled then to a touch; she had been poised as a young god in the integrity of creation.” Now as a widow she decides to eke out the time left to her implementing a long abandoned ideal of independence, doing what she wants and not what others have come to expect.

Integrity with its dual meanings of honesty and wholeness is an important idea in the book. We shall be implicitly invited to judge who has it and who doesn’t. The bit part players are all drawn with marvellous sardonic and comedic complexity. Take the French maid Genoux (it means knees in French) who comes in “rustling like a snake in dry leaves, creaking like a saddle, for, until May was out, Genoux would not abandon the layers of brown paper that reinforced her corsets and her combinations against the English climate.” Apart from Edith and Kay the Slane offspring and their wives are a materialistic, bombastic and entitled clan who know much better than Lady Slane what her best interests are. Even Lord Henry, who is portrayed as a paragon of aristocratic civility, is forced to admit in reference to William and Lavinia. “I find it difficult to accommodate myself to minds balanced like ledgers.”

VTS clearly knew the upper class and diplomatic way of life inside out and she strategically refrains from making cheap ideological points at their collective expense. There is a brief reference to a new political party called Labour who, it is implied, will endeavour to sort out this inward looking menagerie of the wealthy and honorifically privileged. VTS is not therefore a revolutionary. Clearly she believes the hegemony of the rich and the masculine must be dismantled but in the meantime all a woman can do is understand how that world works to suppress individuality and pursue one’s own authentic path with a heart.

The book begins and ends with a corpse. We are invited to take a close-up look of first the husband and later the widow. The widow detects things in his physiognomy she never noticed in life. Henry’s front of charm and affability utterly disguised his ruthless ambition, his hardness. Now she sees it etched into his death mask. With Lady Slane it is entirely different. Mr Gosheron sees in her death features only unselfregarding beauty. “For beauty in death you have to fall back on character,” he tells Bucktrout. “If I want to size a person up I picture them dead. That always gives it away, especially as they don’t know that you’re doing it.” This is a superb final scene, funny, sad, thought provoking. The two eccentric old gentlemen friends of Lady Slane and the hypocritically cynical daughter, Carrie, who traduces them as a pair of vulgarians on the make. “Oh goodness,” she thinks, “will these two never stop talking across mother like a Greek chorus!” As a climax it links us straight back to the beginning and lives long in the reader’s memory. Carrie knows they are silently judging her for who she really is behind the disguise of upper class respectability. “In the presence of death,” she admonishes Gosheron vindictively, “you might at least take off your hat.”

FIVE STARS