The Twyborn Affair

The Twyborn Affair
1st edition cover
Author(s)	Patrick White
Country	Australia
Language	English
Publisher	Jonathan Cape
Publication date	1979
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	432 pp
ISBN	0-09-945821-7
OCLC Number	247822285
Preceded by	A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
Followed by	Memoirs of Many in One (1986)

The Twyborn Affair is a novel by Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White, first published in 1979. The three parts of the novel are set in a villa on the French Riviera before the First World War, a sheep station on the edge of Australia's Snowy Mountains in the inter-war period, and in London in the lead-up to the Second World War. White charts the transmigration of a soul through three different identities — Eudoxia, Eddie, and Eadith — two of them in female guise.

As in many of White's novels, the main focus is on identity; White views his subject from masculine–feminine, colonial–English, rural–metropolitan, and bourgeois–bohemian polarities. The writing has been described as vivid and painterly in its attention to landscape, and remorseless in its critical dissection of social conventions. The novel is a virtuosic display of White's characteristic "wicked" humour.

The Twyborn Affair was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1979, but was removed at the request of the author, that it make way for the work of younger and more deserving writers. This reflects White's refusal, later in life, of all literary awards. He made an exception for the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature, but sent a surrogate to Sweden to accept the award on his behalf.