Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton

Twilight Sleep is a 1927 novel by American writer and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Edith Wharton. It is here republished in a lovely new jacket by Smith & Taylor Classics.

Pauline Manford is married to Dexter Manford, and they have a daughter, Nona. Pauline also has a son, Jim, by a previous husband, Arthur Wyant. Jim is married to the flighty flapper girl, Lita, who is growing restless with her marriage. Much concern in the family circles around keeping this marriage together. At the head of these efforts is the indomitable Pauline, who has endless reserves of energy and optimism. However, despite Pauline’s outward exuberance, her wellbeing is heavily reliant on a mixture of wellness treatments and popular self-help strategies from an army of personal gurus. 

While much of the family’s focus is on Jim and Lita’s marriage, the eminently sensible daughter Nona is having private troubles of her own. She is in love with Stanley Heuston, an unhappily married man whose wife won’t allow a divorce. Living in the midst of so much material comfort, a deep irony is at play as Nona finds her life spiritually empty. 

While mostly satirical in tone, the story builds up to a violent climax that leaves Wharton’s cast of characters stumbling around for answers, but unable to find any. 


Reading through this 100 year old novel, it’s striking how closely it echoes many of today’s fad and obsessions. The action focuses on affluent middle-class life, and how the very well off spend (or waste) their time. Wharton’s razor sharp observations of the vanities and inanities of the rich almost reads as a companion piece to American philosopher Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), a book that dissected middle class tastes, manners and self delusions. The novel’s main theme, it could be argued, is how the idle rich spend their time pursuing useless busy work. Many times in the text Wharton has her characters lament how empty days spent trying to relax only results in more stress.

“Certainly, no amount of "mental deep-breathing," and all the other exercises in serenity, could combat the nervous apprehension produced by this breathless New York life. Today she really felt it to be too much for her: she leaned back and closed her lids with a sigh. But she was jerked back to consciousness by the traffic-control signal, which had immobilized the motor just when every moment was so precious. The result of every one's being in such a hurry to get everywhere was that nobody could get anywhere. She looked across the triple row of motors in line with hers, and saw in each (as if in a vista of mirrors) an expensively dressed woman like herself, leaning forward in the same attitude of repressed impatience, the same nervous frown of hurry on her brow."

"Oh, if only she could remember to relax!”

A witty and rather savage portrait of American wealth in the 1920s.

Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton. Published by Smith and Taylor Classics. $29.99

APRIL 25