The Paget girls sound like something out of a fairytale. Born to a well-to-do gentry family in 1916, the identical twins were stunningly beautiful, with pale skin and goldspun hair and the sort of eyes that people really did describe as “sparkling”.
Norman Parkinson, the society photographer, pestered them to pose. Couturiers competed to dress them. Naturally gregarious — although they preferred the word “friendable” — the Pagets crossed paths with all the mid-century cultural superstars. Mamaine, the younger, had love affairs with the writers Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus, while Celia was entangled with the philosopher AJ Ayer, while managing to dodge George Orwell. Sartre deeply admired them, although he found it hard to tell them apart.
Unsurprisingly, the Pagets pop up in other people’s biographies: a couple of lines in the index and third-figure-from-the-left in photographs. Now, for the first time, they step forward to take center stage. Their story is told here by Ariane Bankes, Celia Paget’s daughter, who inherited a trunk full of letters between her mother and her aunt.
Despite being psychically entwined, as adults the twins were often living in different parts of the world and consequently they poured their hopes and anxieties into their correspondence. One of their pet peeves was the way that men kept on falling in love with them. A letter of early 1949 ends with Mamaine commiserating with Celia, who was at the time fending off the attentions of her particularly insistent boss: “I am sorry for you — it is a dog’s life having people wanting to marry one, unkind as it sounds to say so.”
Mamaine, the younger, had love affairs with the writers Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus, while Celia was entangled with the philosopher AJ Ayer, while managing to dodge George Orwell.
All this makes the Pagets sound ghastly. However, unlike their friends the tiresome Mitford sisters, the twins were not eccentric, conceited or politically extreme. Despite not going to university (they made do with a Swiss finishing school), they were curious and conscientious autodidacts. Celia went on to work at History Today magazine, while Mamaine helped the Hungarian émigré Koestler wrestle his prose into polished English. In middle age they liked to compare notes on their respective translations of Homer.
Orphaned by the age of 12, the twins bought a house in Fulham when they turned 21 and invited whoever they wanted to pop in for some clever chat. Instinctively liberal, they mixed with a slightly older generation who had devoted their youth to communism on the grounds that it was the best way of defeating the fascism that was spreading through Europe. By the late Thirties that youthful idealism was giving way to disillusionment. Koestler, whom Mamaine would go on to marry, was busy scribbling Darkness at Noon, a chilling fictionalized exposé of Stalin’s show trials.
With an uncanny parallel, Celia would become very close to another former left-wing sympathizer. Orwell had become disenchanted during his time fighting alongside socialists, Trotskyites and anarchists on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. In 1949, he published Nineteen Eighty-Four as a dark reminder of the corruption that had appeared in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. He also fell hard for Celia, lamenting that he was not good-looking enough for her (he wasn’t — the twins remained glorious-looking into middle age). Less romantically, Orwell was also on the lookout for a good stepmother for Richard, the baby he had adopted with his late wife Eileen.
Bankes is scrupulous about not drowning the twins’ voices by incorporating too much information from outside their letters into her narrative. In one way this is admirably disciplined, but in another it does mean that we end up with a partial account and some odd blind spots.
One of their pet peeves was the way that men kept on falling in love with them.
In recent times Orwell and Koestler have been accused of inflicting sexual violence on the women in their lives. Yet you would hardly know any of this from the twins’ letters. While Bankes concedes that both men were womanizers (Koestler was unfaithful to Mamaine, while Orwell reacted to Celia’s rejection by immediately marrying another woman, Sonia Brownell), she never wonders why the twins put up with what sounds like some shocking bad behavior.
This passivity seems doubly odd given that the women were clear that their ultimate ambition was marriage and children — their bohemianism was never more than skin deep. Why, then, did they spend so much time on bad boys? Is this the vulnerability to which the book refers several times, but never quite defines?
More pragmatically, Bankes is not able to do anything about the fact that her narrative tells us much more about Mamaine than Celia. This is because Mamaine as an adult moved around a great deal, including a stint in America, and her papers, comprising the letters she received from her twin, disappeared in multiple house moves. Beyond this, though, one senses a reticence on Bankes’s part to delve too deeply into her mother’s psyche.
In an epilogue Bankes explains how she grew up obsessed with her aunt, who died the year before she was born in 1955. Celia, bereft by the loss of her twin, attempted to turn her daughter into her lost sister. “Mamaine became the shadowy third in our relationship, tantalizingly present in our thoughts yet absent from our lives. Celia’s unintentional equation of the two of us was flattering, but also constraining.”
Beneath this enigmatic resignation, one senses a flash of resentment and anger, and also, perhaps, the hint of a deeper and darker story about the perils of family myth-making.
Kathryn Hughes is an author, academic, and critic, specializing in the Victorian period. She also writes for The Guardian and The New York Review of Books
