The Roaring Twenties a time of complete change from Victorian and Edwardian eras, only two decades removed, the Great War catapulted moral values and customs at an exhilarated pace, what was shocking a few years previously became common practice, after the butchering of millions, the old ways seems disingenuous even hypocritical. The Lost Generation cared little for the ancient habits of their parents, and beliefs, was it not they that led to the trenches and the slaughterhouse? The young would

I enjoyed this way more than THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. There, I said it.

Once again, GR 'poofs' my review. Why on earth don't they fix this glitch!! Now in a nutshell, a very light read for a classic. I felt no attachment for any of the characters, other than Nona. It was a good look into the life of the elite, well-to-do, who think that most any problem can be solved by writing a (very large) check. The ending was absolutely crazy, and wildly entertaining. I did not expect it. Some parts I found to be quite hum drum, especially relating to all of Pauline's 'rests' a...

What can I say about Edith Wharton's "Twilight Sleep"? Absolutely nothing. There is practically no plotline, and, if the story is meant to be character driven, these are paper thin cardboard cut-outs. "Twilight Sleep" revolves around a family in the elite. Mrs Manford is the matriarch; a perfectionist who is involved in the social happenings, obsessed with the occult as a solution to her moral conundrums, and whose opinions are eclectic and self-opposing.A lot of the humor of this book is meant

Oh, Edith Wharton, how do I love thee, let me count the ways. Just started this book- interesting- more "Jazz Age" focused than we think of when we think Edith Wharton. Looking forward to giving full review when finished...... so, now that we're done... hm.The thing is, there's a reason that we associate Edith Wharton with American Victorianism more than Modernism (which is actually the time period in which she wrote)- why we associate her with Henry James more than, oh, I don't know, TS Elliot,...

Mona, the sensible, clear-headed nineteen year old, who sees and understands all, in reality. Not married, with no prospects, and no great desire to marry, she is wary of the institution that seems to be such an object of derision and fascination to Edith Wharton.Lita, married to Mona's beloved half brother Jim, who is not only unsympathetic with early twentieth century New York society mores and morals, but is actively involved in being cast in "the movies", including publication on dreaded pos...

Oh, Edith Wharton. What happened here? You know I usually love you, but this was a hot mess. Pretty terrible. I can appreciate the overarching theme: rich, shallow, vapid people, looking for satisfaction and happiness in all the wrong places, always coming up short, not understanding why. (Just like the celebrities of today...pretty clueless for the most part.) We read this for book club and all agreed that it was Not Good. I did learn a little about the medical procedure that was "twilight slee...

Pauline Manford is a superlative New York hostess and do-gooder, organizing her causes and her social events with equal efficiency and panache, while taking care of herself by going to a series of self-help gurus. Her daughter-in-law Lita is a child of the Jazz Age, though, and her boredom with her marriage affects all of Pauline's family, until everything might come crashing down on them.Compared to Wharton's earlier, greater novels, this is overplotted and undercharacterized; I often felt as t...

Well.....I read this book for a book club. It was a long, dull, and tedious task to finish this for me. I kept hoping that some type of a PLOT would emerge and whisk me away to no avail. It is never a good thing when you have checked how many pages you have left to read after chapter 2....and this book is not short! My edition had 374 pages...if you are counting.To be fair...it seemed in a similar vein to Ethan Frome. It captures the dialogue and thinking of a particular time well. If you like E...

This book was so good. Deliciously nighttime soap opera-esque but with sophisticated, complex characters. I'd forgotten how much I love Edith Wharton's work. Although there were almost too many characters to juggle, I didn't want there to be an end to this book.

I had never read this Wharton novel, which was a bestseller in 1927 and has faded into (relative) obscurity, largely I think because of its apparent lightness. Wharton was a huge fan of Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and she borrowed some of its tactics here, targeting modern fads for emotional and physical self-improvement and recognizing a fickleness and hollowness in those superficial panaceas for spiritual ennui. When the narration follows matriarch Pauline whose Progressive Era cause...

This is far from the best novel Wharton wrote, but it's also far from the worst. Wharton's use of "twilight sleep" (a kind of partial anesthesia given to women to help in childbirth; the woman remained conscious, but in a dreamlike state) as a metaphor for the moral failings (and afflictions) of the characters in the novel is ingenious. Wharton plays off of that metaphor, exploring in detail the implications of willful ignorance of the circumstances her characters find themselves in and, worse,

One of my favorite authors, one of my favorite styles of fiction: pretty people with pretty problems. And in this case, a satire of pretty people with pretty problems.Pauline is the typical over-scheduled, constantly in search of happiness and enlightenment society matron. Her day is so full of "eurythmic exercise," silent meditation, and meetings of the Birth Control Society and the American Motherhood Society that she can't even pencil in a quick chat with her daughter Nona. Nona is Pauline's

Either this book was really boring, or it was a very clever metaphor for the boring lives of the characters within. It never seemed to get to a point. I suppose I would have to read some other books of Wharton's to be able to decide.I think one of the reasons for my impatience might be that I misread or misinterpreted the cover summary...I was under the impression that the characters were going to discover some actual drug that was going to liven up their lives/numb their blinding boredom and pu...

Edith Wharton wrote three ‘jazz age’ novels; Glimpses of the Moon, (1922) The Children (1928) and this one. I thought Glimpses of the Moon was readable but as a Wharton novel a bit frothy and insubstantial, but I really rather liked The Children. For me Twilight Sleep falls somewhere between the two, not just chronologically, it has far more substance than Glimpses of the Moon. It is a little slow to get going – but having settled into it I did enjoy it, although it is a long way away from the s...

Matriarch Pauline Manford is signed up for every committee there is and practices every Jazz Age New Age fad that comes along. Just imagine what a tizzy she would have been in if The Oprah had been around in the Twenties.All these activities help Pauline conveniently not notice her husband's indecent obsession with their daughter-in-law. Daughter Nona has her own suspicions but says nothing because she's got her own soap opera to deal with, being in love with a married man who is in love with......

This jazz-era Wharton novel begins strong, and ends in the sort of a haze that the title refers to. Twilight Sleep was a form of tranquilizing regimen that allowed people to move through the 20's in a cloud, feeling content and unaffected by any external force. It is difficult to tell who the principle character of this novel is, as the story sort of revolves continuously around an established New York family. Themes of dancing, faddish spiritual indulgences, divorce and affairs thread through t...

A rather dated novel from the Jazz Age people running around having affairs, seeking spiritual "treatment", and spending like there's no tomorrow....wait that sounds like something from the last five years. Wharton's female characters are spunky but the younger women are rendered through distasteful elderly eyes and with a certain amount of regret. Her matronly character Pauline is spot on though and the scenes of her negotiating with husband, children, servants really bring out Wharton's subtle...

What a gem! Read this as part of a Stanford Continued Ed. class on Jazz Age fiction. While I had read MUCH of E. Wharton years ago this is one I had not read nor know she wrote. What wit and sarcasm but also poignancy about missed relationships and misunderstanding. This book despite being set in the mid 20s as it skewers the frenetic actions and obsessions of every latest "fad" by the protagonist has relevance to today's society and strivings of over-progammed children and adults searching to "...

I've always been an Edith Wharton fan but had never heard of this book until I came upon it by accident. Now that I've read it I'm really glad I bought it and actually think it's one of Wharton's best novels. Wonderfully written, the book is so incredibly modern it sometimes gives the reader the impression it was written only a few years ago. As usual, Edith Wharton proves to be an astute (and fierce!) observer of human nature and I love the way she dissects her characters to reveal their deepes...

Twilight sleep,an often neglected Wharton novel,takes place during the Jazz Age in America and offers a sampling of every 1920s fad: psychoanalysis,New Age spiritualism,self-help books,consumer science,drugs,plastic surgery,and eugenics...“from the treatment of the mentally deficient to the elucidation of the profoundest religious mysteries.”

Well, slightly biased, because Edith Wharton is my all-time favorite author, so basically anytime I find something of hers to read I'm giddy with joy and delight. The story rings true in every way, our society is still mad about consumerism, health fads and quackery, and outdoing the Jones. Kind of what got us into this mess that is 2009.

This is an older book by an author that was popular decades ago and is now sort of coming back into favor. Given to me during my Egypt trip by Steve, one of my shipmates. If you can get through the language, it's not half bad--witty but in a very subtle way. Definitely one of those that you actually have to pay attention to every word though instead of just kind of skimming lazily through it.

You know you're probably not going to get blown away by a book if the introductory note admits it's not the author's greatest and has been out of print for a while. And it's true; Twilight Sleep does not begin to compare to the funny complexity of The Age of Innocence. Still, Pauline amused me, especially every time she found a new mage or sage, and as ever the attention to the surroundings evoke the era beautifully.

I gave Twilight Sleep three stars only because it suffers by comparison with Wharton's other, greater books, but anything by Wharton is worth reading and this one is quite fascinating as a portrait of the Roaring Twenties. It seems that some missed the point of the novel (as I see it), so I will attempt to suggest it without giving away the plot. This is by my own lights, of course, and YMMV.The story follows an extremely wealthy New York family and their circle. Wharton parodies American wealth...

Reading this book felt like going right to the heart, Vivian Gornick-style, of what Wharton is trying to work out through her fiction. Like Newland Archer from The Age of Innocence, she seems to feel on a gut level that people should be free to follow their own inclinations, especially when it comes to romantic love, but she keeps returning to the question of how it can be possible to pursue that path without trampling on the needs and feelings of others. She looks at the problem from every angl...

This did not feel like an Edith Wharton book. The scenery, the atmosphere, and the characters, with all their jazz age whimsies and peccadilloes, so familiar to me because they smacked of the jazzmeister's touch. I speak of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who could pigeonhole his characters and satirize his fiction just as deftly as that other chap who has forever caught my fancy: Somerset Maugham. The book is awash with unlikeable characters, all of them unhappy though ensconced in the most favorable of s...

Long and dull, Wharton's novel approaches but never engages the moral issues of the day: promiscuity, divorce, alcoholism, an aimless, superficial generation, an infatuation with expensive quacks and fakes, and more. The characters are lacking, each a one-dimensional figures that exaggerate the issues of the day. We spend far too much time inside the mind of Pauline, one of the lead female characters. Her thoughts and plans are really not that interesting! Like nearly everyone in the novel, she

I have to wonder if Tom Wolfe had this book in mind when he wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe's send up of New York's elite in the 1980s has nothing on Wharton's treatment of them during the 1920s. Pauline Manford is so busy putting her time and money into "worthy" causes that she doesn't have a moment to notice what's really going on in her family. Instead she turns to a series of charlatan soothsayers who are more than willing to tell her wonderful she is in return for a chunk of her do...

I picked up Twilight Sleep in a local bookstore, intrigued that I had never heard of its despite its famous author. Having now read it, I would say it's not necessarily a bad book, but it is definitely strange, and not on the level of Wharton's more famous novels, such as The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence. There isn't much of a plot to Twilight Sleep, yet I also hesitate to call it a character driven novel, because the characters are generally pretty one-dimensional and don't develop mu...