Twilight Sleep

Everyone wants a painless life. Edith Wharton asks what it costs.

New York, 1927. Pauline Manford has arranged her life so efficiently that there is scarcely time to feel anything. Her days are filled with appointments, causes, treatments, spiritual advisers, and the latest promises of health, beauty, and harmony.

But around her, the family she is determined to keep orderly is beginning to come apart.

In Twilight Sleep, Edith Wharton turns her characteristic irony on a society convinced that discomfort can be managed away. Marriage, desire, money, motherhood, work, and fashionable cures become part of the same restless search for a life untouched by pain.

First published in 1927, this striking Jazz Age novel feels remarkably contemporary in its portrait of distraction, self-improvement, and the refusal to confront what cannot simply be fixed.

This annotated edition includes an original introduction and contextual notes by Celia Harrow, illuminating Wharton's world while allowing the novel's wit, tension, and unsettling relevance to speak for themselves.