Twilight Sleep

by Edith Wharton

Overview

The celebrated author of The Age of Innocence offers a biting satire of Jazz Age society in this tale of indulgence, infidelity, and family dysfunction.

Nona Manford is in love with the wrong man—or at least, she’s in love with a man whose wife won’t grant a divorce. When she isn’t preoccupied with her own romantic dilemma, Nona is busy trying to save the marriage of her stepbrother, Jim. But Jim’s wife, Lita, is desperate to escape her domestic role for a life of dancing, champagne, and glamour. And meanwhile, the family’s older generation isn’t faring much better.

An instant bestseller when it was first published in 1927, Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep is both a scathing satire of Jazz Age frivolity and a psychologically probing portrait of a family coming apart at the seams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504083874
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	01/01/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	380
Sales rank:	458,714
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) published more than forty books during her lifetime, including the classic Gilded Age society novels Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and The Age of Innocence, for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Date of Birth:

January 24, 1862

Date of Death:

August 11, 1937

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France

Education:

Educated privately in New York and Europe

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Miss Bruss, the perfect secretary, received Nona Manford at the door of her mother's boudoir ("the office," Mrs. Manford's children called it) with a gesture of the kindliest denial.

"She wants to, you know, dear -- your mother always wants to see you," pleaded Maisie Bruss, in a voice which seemed to be thinned and sharpened by continuous telephoning. Miss Bruss, attached to Mrs. Manford's service since shortly after the latter's second marriage, had known Nona from her childhood, and was privileged, even now that she was "out," to treat her with a certain benevolent familiarity -- benevolence being the note of the Manford household.

"But look at her list -- just for this morning!" the secretary continued, handing over a tall morocco-framed tablet, on which was inscribed, in the colourless secretarial hand: "7.30 Mental uplift. 7.45 Breakfast. 8. Psycho-analysis. 8.15 See cook. 8.30 Silent Meditation. 8.45 Facial massage. 9. Man with Persian miniatures. 9.15 Correspondence. 9.30 Manicure. 9.45 Eurythmic exercises. 10. Hair waved. 10.15 Sit for bust. 10.30 Receive Mothers' Day deputation. 11. Dancing lesson. 11.30 Birth Control committee at Mrs. --"

"The manicure is there now, late as usual. That's what martyrizes your mother; everybody's being so unpunctual. This New York life is killing her."

"I'm not unpunctual," said Nona Manford, leaning in the doorway.

"No; and a miracle, too! The way you girls keep up your dancing all night. You and Lita -- what times you two do have!" Miss Bruss was becoming almost maternal. "But just run your eye down that list --. You see your mother didn't expect to see you before lunch;now did she?"

Nona shook her head. "No; but you might perhaps squeeze me in."

It was said in a friendly, a reasonable tone; on both sides the matter was being examined with an evident desire for impartiality and good-will. Nona was used to her mother's engagements; used to being squeezed in between faith-healers, art-dealers, social service workers and manicures. When Mrs. Manford did see her children she was perfect to them; but in this killing New York life, with its ever-multiplying duties and responsibilities, if her family had been allowed to tumble in at all hours and devour her time, her nervous system simply couldn't have stood it -- and how many duties would have been left undone!

Mrs. Manford's motto had always been: "There's a time for everything." But there were moments when this optimistic view failed her, and she began to think there wasn't. This morning, for instance, as Miss Bruss pointed out, she had had to tell the new French sculptor who had been all the rage in New York for the last month that she wouldn't be able to sit to him for more than fifteen minutes, on account of the Birth Control committee meeting at 11.30 at Mrs. --

Nona seldom assisted at these meetings, her own time being -- through force of habit rather than real inclination -- so fully taken up with exercise, athletics and the ceaseless rush from thrill to thrill which was supposed to be the happy privilege of youth. But she had had glimpses enough of the scene: of the audience of bright elderly women, with snowy hair, eurythmic movements, and finely-wrinkled over-massaged faces on which a smile of glassy benevolence sat like their rimless pince-nez. They were all inexorably earnest, aimlessly kind and fathomlessly pure; and all rather too well-dressed, except the "prominent woman" of the occasion, who usually wore dowdy clothes, and had steel-rimmed spectacles and straggling wisps of hair. Whatever the question dealt with, these ladies always seemed to be the same, and always advocated with equal zeal Birth Control and unlimited maternity, free love or the return to the traditions of the American home; and neither they nor Mrs. Manford seemed aware that there was anything contradictory in these doctrines. All they knew was that they were determined to force certain persons to do things that those persons preferred not to do. Nona, glancing down the serried list, recalled a saying of her mother's former husband, Arthur Wyant: "Your mother and her friends would like to teach the whole world how to say its prayers and brush its teeth."

The girl had laughed, as she could never help laughing at Wyant's sallies; but in reality she admired her mother's zeal, though she sometimes wondered if it were not a little too promiscuous. Nona was the daughter of Mrs. Manford's second marriage, and her own father, Dexter Manford, who had had to make his way in the world, had taught her to revere activity as a virtue in itself; his tone in speaking of Pauline's zeal was very different from Wyant's. He had been brought up to think there was a virtue in work per se, even if it served no more useful purpose than the revolving of a squirrel in a wheel. "Perhaps your mother tries to cover too much ground, but it's very fine of her, you know -- she never spares herself."

"Nor us!" Nona sometimes felt tempted to add; but Manford's admiration was contagious. Yes; Nona did admire her mother's altruistic energy; but she knew well enough that neither she nor her brother's wife Lita would ever follow such an example -- she no more than Lita. They belonged to another generation: to the bewildered disenchanted young people who had grown up since the Great War, whose energies were more spasmodic and less definitely directed, and who, above all, wanted a more personal outlet for them. "Bother earthquakes in Bolivia!" Lita had once whispered to Nona, when Mrs. Manford had convoked the bright elderly women to deal with a seismic disaster at the other end of the world, the repetition of which these ladies somehow felt could be avoided if they sent out a commission immediately to teach the Bolivians to do something they didn't want to do -- not to believe in earthquakes, for instance.

The young people certainly felt no corresponding desire to set the houses of others in order. Why shouldn't the Bolivians have earthquakes if they chose to live in Bolivia? And why must Pauline Manford lie awake over it in New York, and have to learn a new set of Mahatma exercises to dispel the resulting wrinkles? "I suppose if we feel like that it's really because we're too lazy to care," Nona reflected, with her incorrigible honesty.

She turned from Miss Bruss with a slight shrug. "Oh, well," she murmured.

"You know, pet," Miss Bruss volunteered, "things always get worse as the season goes on; and the last fortnight in February is the worst of all, especially with Easter coming as early as it does this year. I never could see why they picked out such an awkward date for Easter: perhaps those Florida hotel people did it. Why, your poor mother wasn't even able to see your father this morning before he went down town, though she thinks it's all wrong to let him go off to his office like that, without finding time for a quiet little chat first...Just a cheery word to put him in the right mood for the day...Oh, by the way, my dear, I wonder if you happen to have heard him say if he's dining at home tonight? Because you know he never does remember to leave word about his plans, and if he hasn't, I'd better telephone to the office to remind him that it's the night of the big dinner for the Marchesa --"

"Well, I don't think father's dining at home," said the girl indifferently.

"Not -- not -- not? Oh, my gracious!" clucked Miss Bruss, dashing across the room to the telephone on her own private desk.

The engagement-list had slipped from her hands, and Nona Manford, picking it up, ran her glance over it. She read: "4 P.M. See A. -- 4.30 P.M. Musical: Torfried Lobb."

"4 P.M. See A." Nona had been almost sure it was Mrs. Manford's day for going to see her divorced husband, Arthur Wyant, the effaced mysterious person always designated on Mrs. Manfo

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

New York Evening Post 1927 A brilliant and penetrating study of life in the upper social circles of New York...its people all fully and sharply characterized, its story managed with the most praiseworthy dexterity, and the whole seasoned with the acid of Mrs. Wharton's keen satire.

Gore Vidal There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as "major" — and Edith Wharton is one.

Editorial Reviews

Edith Wharton: Hollywood and the Writer

The year of Edith Wharton was undoubtedly 1993, which saw not only the wide release of film versions of The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome but also a return of Wharton to the bestseller lists. But despite the contemporary image of Wharton as a strictly "literary" author, Hollywood and the bestseller lists were with her throughout her career. In fact, Wharton may have been among the first modern writers to find herself caught between the pressures of art and the pressures of the market, particularly in an era when the "market" meant the film industry.

Wharton saw only one movie in her life, just before the outbreak of World War I, and she seems to have been unimpressed. But despite this apparent lack of feeling for the products of Hollywood, Wharton developed strong impressions of the film industry as a whole. In Summer (1917) she acknowledged film for the first time -- and it is without question her least critical reference. In it, Lucius Harney takes Charity Royall to see a silent film, which is represented as a window on another world:

"For a while, everything was merged in her brain in swimming circles of heat and blinding alterations of light and darkness. All the world has to show seemed to pass before her in a chaos of palms and minarets, charging cavalry regiments, roaring lions, comic policemen and scowling murderers; and the crowd around her, the hundreds of hot, sallow candy-munching faces, young, old, middle-aged, but all kindled with the same contagious excitement, became part of the spectacle, and danced on the screen with the rest."

The film reflects seemingly endless possibilities for Charity. But from this point on, Wharton's impressions of film as a medium and Hollywood as an entity only get worse.

The following year, 1918, Hollywood released The House of Mirth, the first of the films adapted from her novels. In 1923 Paramount produced The Glimpses of the Moon, with dialogue by F. Scott Fitzgerald, followed in 1924 by a Warner Bros. production of The Age of Innocence, both seven-reel silents. In all, Hollywood produced six films based on Wharton's novels while she was still alive and writing.

And Wharton made a bundle from the film industry. The prices recorded by Wharton's biographer, R.W.B. Lewis, for the purchase of the film rights to her novels are huge by the standards of their day: $13,500 for The Glimpses of the Moon, $15,000 for The Age of Innocence, $25,000 for The Children (released as The Marriage Playground in 1929). For a writer who was concerned with the necessity of supporting herself by writing -- and who faced accusations that she "wrote down" to meet the desires of the market -- these numbers cannot be considered negligible. We can only speculate about Wharton's conflicted emotions surrounding that money: money earned, yes, and evidence of a successful career, but money earned at what expense to art?

Wharton refrained from comment on the Hollywood machine -- in her fiction, at least -- until 1927, in Twilight Sleep. This novel, originally written for serialization in The Pictorial Review, was a smashing bestseller but has been out of print for decades. This month Scribner rereleases the novel, giving us the opportunity to look at this first comment of the writer on the industry that had paid her so well but may have served her so poorly.

And what a comment it is. The novel, which revolves around the tangled marriages and romantic involvements of the Manford clan, explores what Wharton saw as the decadence of the Jazz Age, in which the young and old alike sought to variously numb and amuse themselves through wild parties and dancing, excessive drinking, casual marriage and divorce, unthinking devotion to ridiculous "causes," and any set of spiritual beliefs that might relieve them of the necessity of considering the world's real problems. And into this milieu comes Hollywood.

Lita, the young wife of Jim Wyant (the son of Pauline Manford by her first husband), is determined to run off to Hollywood to become a film star. And she is, in fact, being enticed in that direction by a mysterious film director, who appears in only one scene, and anonymously at that:

"A short man with a deceptively blond head, thick lips under a stubby blond moustache, and eyes like needles behind tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, stood before the fire, bulging a glossy shirtfront and solitaire pearl toward the company. 'Don't this lady dance?' he inquired, in a voice like melted butter, a few drops of which seemed to trickle down his lips and be licked back at intervals behind a thickly ringed hand."

Upon discovering that the name of this Hollywood mogul is Serge Klawhammer, further comment on Wharton's opinion seems unnecessary.

In her next novel, The Children, Wharton continues to unleash her growing disgust. We meet here the vapid Lady Wrench, formerly the film star Zinnia LaCrosse. The names Wharton gives her Hollywood functionaries, reminiscent of hardware, convey (and not especially subtly) her growing disapproval of film as an artistic medium. In the words of one of the novel's characters, "Life's a perpetual film to those people. You can't get up out of your seat in the audience and change the current of a film."

Here resides the center of Wharton's conflict with the film industry. Film, she claims, renders its audience passive, leaving them dumb spectators both within the context of the movie theater and outside in their larger lives. As she put it much later, in her preface to Ghosts (now republished by Scribner as The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton), the American mind was "gradually being atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema."

Nonetheless, Hollywood had been a major part of Wharton's career. A film version of her novella The Old Maid was released in 1939, two years after Wharton's death. And then silence. Between 1939 and 1981 only one production based on the work of Edith Wharton was completed: 1960's Ethan Frome, the first of her work to be produced for television.

In 1981, however, Wharton's return began. The House of Mirth, Summer, and Looking Back (a biographical film loosely based on A Backward Glance) were produced under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Two years later, a British company produced three of her ghost stories for PBS's Mystery! series. In 1990, an international production entity released "The Children." And then, in 1993, the full-scale return of Edith Wharton to the Hollywood scene began.

But it is the return of her novels to center stage that we most celebrate here, and for which, in no small measure, Hollywood is responsible. In 1960 Ethan Frome was the last of Wharton's novels still popularly read; now, following Martin Scorsese's loving screen translation of The Age of Innocence, and as Scribner works toward returning all of Wharton's work to print, we can at last rejoice that Hollywood has resurrected one of America's most powerful novelists.

—Kathleen Fitzpatrick

bn.com

New York Evening Post 1927 A brilliant and penetrating study of life in the upper social circles of New York...its people all fully and sharply characterized, its story managed with the most praiseworthy dexterity, and the whole seasoned with the acid of Mrs. Wharton's keen satire.

Gore Vidal There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as "major" — and Edith Wharton is one.

From the Publisher

There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as ‘major’—and Edith Wharton is one.”

praise for the author Gore Vidal

No one captures Old New York society like Edith Wharton, and no one could perform this satirical audiobook better than Carrington MacDuffie. With a gift for tone and a wide array of character voices, MacDuffie brings us a complex story of family, status, and social flaws that seems, in many ways, wholly contemporary. The audiobook takes place in 1920s America, yet MacDuffie captures marital discord, family intrigue, and a general desire for ease and personal peace that most listeners can understand in the 21st century. Pacing and phrasing make the audiobook an engaging listen, and MacDuffie's strong voice is a powerful guide throughout the text. While the plot can stall occasionally, MacDuffie keeps the momentum going with her performance, leading listeners from scene to scene with verve. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2023 -- AudioFile