Twilight Sleep
About this audiobook
Enter the Jazz Age and the lives of the Manfords of New York. A family caught in the rush to enjoy life, regardless of reality. Only Nona Manford can see through the veil of the feigned joie de vivre that everyone around her cloaks themselves in.
Twilight sleep was actually a medical procedure used in the early 20th Century in which pregnant women would be given a mixture of drugs to simultaneously reduce the pain of childbirth and allow the mother to forget the experience altogether.
Edith Wharton uses twilight sleep as a metaphor for the way Americans in the 1920s seemed to do everything in their power to avoid pain and seek quick fixes to their problems.
The Manfords’ avoidance can’t last forever, though. Or can it?
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About the author
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is the author of several novels, including The Age of Innocence and Old New York, both of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was the first woman to receive that honor. In 1929 she was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. She was born in New York and is best known for her stories of life among the upper-class society into which she was born. She was educated privately at home and in Europe. In 1894 she began writing fiction, and her novel The House of Mirth established her as a leading writer.
