Family History by Vita Sackville-West

I have a nasty habit of reading on public transportation, and today I attracted many concerned glances as I was trying to stifle my sobs on the Tube as I got to the end of this book. It's definitely not my favourite book by Vita Sackville-West (All Passion Spent is The One), and I can't say that I adored most of it. The greater part of it is a fairly standard modernist society novel (complete with quotes from and allusions to T. S. Eliot and Proust), with what I suspect to be a guest appearance by Virginia Woolf as Viola Anquetil (with a husband named Leonard, very thinly disguised indeed). I also (as usual) was pretty annoyed with the classism in the novel, but unfortunately it's almost unavoidable in writings of that particular time and group. The gender politics were quite disturbing to me as well, because Vita Sackville-West seems to really privilege and praise sexually adventurous women and have little compassion (in this novel especially) for those who are repressed and/or not sexually active, even going so far as to use the phrase 'it would do her all the good in the world to get raped.' But, having said all of this (and yes, that phrase is unforgivable), I felt like the entire book was leading up to the absolutely devastating ending. It was annoying to have to make my way through about 250 pages of unremarkable prose to get to the really great ending, but it was worth it. Everything seemed to come together so perfectly, in such a wonderful culmination of the entire story, I was completely swept away and embarrassingly overemotional on the Tube.