THE DAZZLING PAGET SISTERS: The English Twins Who Captivated Literary Europe, by Ariane Bankes
Move over, Véra. See ya, Zelda. Make way for Celia and Mamaine.
The dazzling Paget sisters, as they’ve been rebranded by the U.S. edition of a book published in the United Kingdom as “The Quality of Love,” were identical twins, that category of perpetual aesthetic and scientific fascination.
Born in 1916, orphaned at 12 and educated unconventionally, they grew up to be vivid but fragile poppies among tall waving wheat stalks of midcentury intellectualism: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Wilson, André Malraux, Benjamin Britten, etc.
Though the sisters did not have public bylines, they wrote prolifically and vividly in private. Celia edited a selection of Mamaine’s letters to Koestler, the Austro-Hungarian polymath who was her longtime and somewhat bitter sweetheart, which was published in 1985.
(True, when the general onslaught of correspondence proved overwhelming, Mamaine complained to Celia: “It is a stinking bore.”)
Forty years later, Celia’s daughter, Ariane Bankes, having inherited a “capacious and sooty black” tin trunk stuffed with envelopes and folders, has produced an enchanting double-helix biography of her mother and aunt.
Without undermining the scholarly significance and rigor of “The Dazzling Paget Sisters,” let me note that this relatively slender book contains enough mad capers, heaving proposals and dramatic death throes to be a veritable Harlequin romance for the literary set, with a dash of Sweet Valley High. (“Even Sartre was hoodwinked by Celia pretending to be Mamaine on a later trip to Paris.”)
