Twilight Sleep is a novel by American author Edith Wharton and was first published in 1927 as a serial in the Pictorial Review before being published as a novel in the same year. The story, filled with irony, is centered around a socialite family navigating the New York of the Jazz Age and their relationships. This novel landed at number one on the best-selling list just two months after its publication and finished the year at number 7. Even as a best selling novel Twilight Sleep was not well received by critics at the time, who, while appreciating Wharton as a writer, struggled with the scenarios and characters she had created in the novel. While it was not considered as such in its own time period, today Twilight Sleep is widely considered to be a modernist novel as it employs modernist literary devices, such as an ever changing narration among the novel's characters and a close examination of the characters' self-identities and relationships with one another.
When the Pictorial Review published Twilight Sleep as a serialized story, the headline proclaimed it "the finest novel of New York society," and the sales seem to agree. Twilight Sleep appears on many lists, such as Publishers Weekly, in the top ten bestsellers of 1927, but upon its release, the critics were largely underwhelmed. Percy Hutchison wrote in The New York Times that he did not believe Wharton could live up to Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth, but he mostly begins his review praising her and her past works. He uses these works to excuse certain shortcomings of Twilight Sleep: "But she maintains herself at so consistently high a level that any occasional faltering of the imagination may be charitably set down as nothing more serious than a change of pace, any lapse in artistry as a mere peccadillo of the pen." Edmund Wilson of The New Republic is less critical of the novel, as well, and finds Wharton's loss "of her old harshness" to be an acceptable turn and uses it to excuse her novel being "proportionately less vivid." Like Hutchison and Wilson, many of the other reviewers appear to have had a great appreciation for Wharton's work in itself, but they had much to say about this one not quite adding up to the others.
America voiced a concern "that her latest novel "Twilight Sleep" is an inartistic abandonment of her former office of telling what ought to be known about well-bred people in order to describe the vagaries of the new war-made rich." The people are an issue for several reviewers, The Atlantic was disappointed with the characters, calling them "puppets, pulled at times by too inadequate strings." The puppet theme continues as Hutchison refers to the characters as "marionettes," but his bigger issue stems from the disconnect to America he feels from Wharton and that these puppets are being "operated from a distance rather than persons actually at our side." The Atlantic then gives the verdict that there is a lack of "compelling naturalness in character and in situation." There is a fair amount of critique on the scenarios these characters are put in. America's review counts them as "fantastic," particularly with the people Pauline manages to throw together at her dinner parties. The finale of the novel is no exception. Wilson classified it this way: "when the catastrophe finally occurs, it is not quite dramatic enough." (wikipedia.org)
