Owning a Room of One’s Own: On the Female Self-Construction in All Passion Spent

Abstract

All Passion Spent is British novelist Vita Sackville-West’s masterpiece, an early work that embodies feminist ideas by telling the story of eighty-eight-year-old Mrs Slane, who rejects her children’s arrangement after her husband’s death and insists on choosing to live alone in a house of her own. The novel demonstrates how women under the patriarchal system are gradually being othered, as well as to get rid of this predicament, and explores the way out for women’s freedom and liberation. This work has been hailed as the novel version of the feminist manifesto A Room of One’s Own. The article mainly focuses on three aspects, namely the loss of the female self, the reconstruction of the female self and the inheritance of the female self in All Passion Spent, to explore the feminist thoughts in this novel. Vita not only intends to dig out the material and spiritual dilemmas faced by women but also her exploration and construction of female subjective status and female self, which provides women with a certain amount of spiritual power to know themselves, remake themselves, and realize their self-worth.