Book Mole Double Feature: Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Bowen

Two brilliant women writers, giving witness to the death of two hearts. For Bowen in  Death of the Heart, an adolescent girl orphaned and left in a sort of a codicil to a will to a cold, loveless couple, living a vacuous, allegedly enlightened upper middle class existence in London. And Wharton, in Twilight Sleep,  describes the long life of Pauline and the whole privileged class searching for the blindness of twilight sleep, that combination of ether and sedative, hypnotic agents  that allowed rich women semi-conscious but painless birth accompanied by loss of memory of the traumatic event, hence twilight sleep. More of Larry's reviews, in written form, can be found on his blog.