All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West depicts the central character, Lady Slane, in her late eighties. Her husband has just died, her children are elderly themselves, and there are a great quantity of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Lord Slane, her late husband, was a greatly respected public figure and she was considered the perfect wife. She never really got a life of her own; having married so young. When her husband dies, her children try to make decisions for her, and she suddenly informs them, essentially, that she is not the person that they have taken her for their entire lives. She is going to live out her last years exactly as she pleases, and she is going to arrange it entirely for herself. Her children took her for someone who cannot handle making decisions, because she has always accepted being submissive and never challenged anything or anyone, especially Lord Slane. These thoughts resurface again later in the novel when Lady Slane has inherited a fortune by an old friend. The inheritance introduces an important character, her great-granddaughter, Deborah, who allows them to connect on a series of different levels. Young Deborah and Lady Slane connect in a way that parallels both of them to each other. Lady Slane sees in Deborah’s life and life choices were exactly the path Lady Slane wanted to take, but chose not to. Lady Slane had even tried to convince not only herself, but her deceased friend, Mr. FitzGeorge, that her marriage “had everything that most women would covet” (220). Mr. FitzGeorge goes on to say that her “children, [her] husband, [her] splendor, were nothing but obstacles that kept [her] from [herself]” (220). Lady Slane understood that her marriage meant hindering her artistic ability, and now that she is older, she reflects on how wealth really does not matter; which in turn is the reason why Mr. FitzGeorge decided to leave his fortune with her. Not quite sure what to do with the large fortune, she donates the entirety to the state; knowing for sure she will not leave any of it to her pompous children. Coming to thank “her great-grandmother for reducing her value in the world market” (284), Lady Slane makes connections that Deborah is the reincarnate version of her had she not chosen the life she did with Lord Slane. After some conversing, the young Deborah explains to Lady Slane how the people she chooses to associate herself with are “hard and concentrated in the middle of them, harsh, almost cruel” (286). She even mentions that those very same people