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Sister, Sister

What do we want from the “overlooked woman” biography? Francesc Xavier Gosé, Les dues germanes(ca. 1910). | Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

The Dazzling Paget Sisters by Ariane Bankes. McNally Editions, 192 pages. 2025.

Since Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith And Other Lesser Lives (1972), which excavated the life of the poet George Meredith’s wife, Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, among others, there has been a small but vibrant market for biographies of figures previously relegated to the margins of other people’s lives. Johnson’s book was a feminist intervention that aimed to reanimate the life of a forgotten woman, making inventive use of the minimal available sources. Yet her eye also lingered on many small characters in the periphery of Peacock Meredith’s life, taking the opportunity to discuss overlooked figures more broadly. In this way, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith was part of a wave of social history and cultural studies scholarship of the 1970s onwards dedicated to ordinary people who didn’t leave behind a formal archive.

More recently, though, writers working in Johnson’s feminist vein have had less catholic interests, tending to focus on singular female figures who lived in the shadow of (often literary) men, rather than exploring the web of everyday people with whom their lives intersected. Stacy Schiff’s Verarevolves around one sidelined woman, for instance, and Carmela Ciuraru’s Lives of the Wivesaround five. Ariane Bankes, author of The Dazzling Paget Sisters: The English Twins Who Captivated Literary Europe, continues in this contemporary feminist mode when writing about the lives of Celia and Mamaine Paget—wealthy twin sisters who moved in bohemian circles in England and France in the interwar and postwar period. Bankes notes in her introduction that the twins have had “walk-on parts” in numerous biographies, implicitly those of their male companions; she now wants to give them “starring roles.” This mission is of particular importance to her, we learn, because Celia Paget was her mother and Mamaine her aunt. Perhaps predictably, such proximity to her subjects does not always lead to a clear-eyed view of their historical significance—or the complexities of their intellectual and political development.

The identical Paget twins were born in 1916 to an upper-class family. Their mother’s relatives were “wealthy, landed gentry from Leicestershire” and their father’s family stretched back to Lord Auckland, who had been Governor-General of India from 1836-42, implicitly highlighting one of the sources of their wealth in violent colonial extraction. Despite their material comforts, however, the pair had a difficult young life: their mother died a week after the birth from complications, and their father became sick during their adolescence—probably with Parkinson’s disease—and died shortly after. The twins were taken in by a glamorous aunt and uncle in Roehampton, a neighborhood in southwest London.

There, they entered a rather luxurious life. Uncle Jack and Aunt Germaine employed eighteen servants, had a private swimming pool, and decorated their home with Louis XVI Aubusson tapestries. But Uncle Jack’s “draconian diktats and wild swings of mood often terrorized the household,” making him appear rather like the dictatorial Uncle Matthew of The Pursuit of Love, a novel by the sisters’ near contemporary Nancy Mitford. The twins were sent to a boarding school that they abhorred, until their asthma became bad enough that they were given a reprieve in the form of finishing school in the Swiss Alps. Though both wanted to go to university, they were not permitted by their family to attend.

The pair had their debutante ball in March 1935 and then entered “the Season,” a stultifying routine described by the twins’ acquaintance Jessica Mitford—the journalist, memoirist, and sister of Nancy—as “the specific, English upper class version of the puberty rite.” It began with being presented in formal dress to the king and queen at Buckingham Palace and then spun out into weeks of lunches, cocktail parties, and dances, where upper-class young men and women mingled in order to pair off and replenish the social hierarchy. Mitford wrote of this milieu that “easier would it be, I thought, to recognize the individual faces of sheep on an Australian ranch than to match names and faces among this monotonous sea of seemingly unvaried human beings.”

The twins, who also resented the ritual for its dullness, found an ally in Mitford, who soon ran off with her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, a young journalist and veteran of the International Brigades planning a return to Spain to report on the civil war. (Celia and Mamaine unknowingly served as her alibi when she forged a letter from them inviting her to Austria to cover her tracks.) But Mitford was not alone in finding a beau who would alter the trajectory of her life: Mamaine was wooed by Guy Richard Wyndham, an aristocrat some twenty years her senior who introduced her to an artistic set that included Cyril Connolly, a writer who founded the literary magazine Horizon, and Peter Quennell, a historian and prolific biographer.

Further independence followed in September 1937 when the twins received their inheritance from their father on their twenty-first birthday and bought a house in South Kensington. The funds were generous enough to also provide a yearly income they were able to live off of, supplemented by stints as models for Harrods and Jaeger. Then came World War II. The sisters both volunteered as nurses in Essex during the war but by 1942 were back in South Kensington. Celia married Irish writer Patrick Kirwan only to quickly separate because of his drinking, while Mamaine maintained an unsteady romance with Wyndham.

There’s a reason I keep coming back to these kinds of personal details despite the world-changing events the Pagets were living through: much of Bankes’s book is devoted to tracing the romantic lives of each sister, with far less space given to their professional accomplishments or intellectual development. Often, the men’s politics and views overshadow the sisters’ own, leaving you wondering what they made of the huge historical events of the twentieth century. Early on, Arthur Koestler is introduced as Mamaine’s lover (and eventual husband). A novelist and Jewish Hungarian former communist turned ardent anticommunist, when he met Mamaine in January 1944, Koestler was best known for Darkness at Noon, based on Stalin’s show trials, and Arrival and Departure, which drew on the account of a Polish resistance fighter who had witnessed the atrocities of the Nazi camps. Eleven years Mamaine’s senior, he was volatile, prone to mood swings exacerbated by his drinking. Yet Koestler’s political analysis is expanded upon at far greater length than Mamaine’s in Bankes’s book, replicating in print her role as helpmate in life.

Accounts of the couple’s trips to Paris, beginning in the fall of 1946, index the developing factions of the postwar left in which Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir loomed large. De Beauvoir described Mamaine as “‘very pretty, with a sharp wit; graceful and fragile.’” She at first found Koestler “‘vain and self-important,’” but then was won over: “‘he was also generous with his time, with himself, and also with his money; he had no taste for ostentation, but when one went out with him he always wanted to pay for everything and never counted the cost.’” Mamaine is subsumed by Koestler in many of the passages describing the pair’s time in France, except for those documenting her burgeoning affair with Camus, an escape from Koestler’s overbearing personality.

By October 1947, Koestler’s friendship with Sartre and de Beauvoir had become virtually untenable over his anticommunist commitments, which increasingly found him right-wing allies. As Bankes notes, de Beauvoir wrote that, “‘what is rather wrong with [Koestler] is that he hates communists so much he can be friends with the most conservative people and write in conservative papers and support a conservative policy.’” A year later, the rift had become complete: Sartre and de Beauvoir would not see the couple. As Mamaine explained to Celia in a letter, they thought that “someone who is a friend of [André] Malraux”—the critic and novelist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and French resistance, only to become a committed Gaullist after World War II—“can’t be a friend of theirs—can you beat it? Je n’y comprends plus rien, except that all French intellectuals are raving mad.”

Claiming she “understood nothing,” Mamaine did not directly engage with these emerging political disputes, but she seems to have allied herself with Koestler’s increasingly conservative anticommunism and his Zionism. He went on to helm the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin in June 1950, though it is unclear whether he knew of the CIA’s ties to the conference. Mamaine wrote to the critic Edmund Wilson that “‘K is going to Berlin at the end of this month for what is sure to be a mucked-up conference of mushheads, as these things always are.’” Bankes gives little sense of what this quotation signifies: Was Mamaine skeptical of organized politics altogether at this point, or was there something about this particular gathering that drew her ire? Her views are perhaps meant to be deduced from the fact that she helped Koestler with his books and political circuits, but these occasional irruptions of mockery suggest a disquiet that is not fully explored.

Mamaine also accompanied Koestler on a trip to Palestine and Israel in June 1948, soon after the British Mandate ended. We learn little of her views of the region, and what we do learn is dispiritingly feeble given the forced displacement and massacre of Palestinians happening around the time of her travels. She found Tel Aviv “‘uglier than [her] wildest fears,’” and it “sickened them both” to see “the internecine carnage”; her time was mostly spent helping Koestler with research for his writing and driving a jeep to a river to escape the city. Again, Bankes positions Mamaine as an aide to Koestler, albeit an increasingly dissatisfied one.

Similarly, Celia’s political beliefs are only sketchily introduced and discussed. We are told that she was “naturally left-wing” but learn little more of how that commitment came to be or what it meant to her. This vagueness is in stark contrast to the memoirs of the preeminent class traitor hailing from the British aristocracy and the twins’ old friend, Jessica Mitford, whose second memoir, A Fine Old Conflict, details her time in the American Communist Party. Mitford opens the book with a remembered scene from her adolescence:

As a disconsolate teenager, going for the regulation “nice Sunday walk” in Hyde Park with Nanny or our governess, I often wandered off to Speakers Corner to listen to the Communist orators on their soap boxes and to join in singing in their stirring anthem “The Internationale”:

     Tis the final conflict,
     Let each stand in his place,
     The Internationale
     Shall be the human race…

For some years, before I saw the words written down, I thought it began: “It’s a fine old conflict . . . ” which to me it was then and ever shall be.

This brief sketch animates some of how Mitford learned of leftist politics within a cosseted environment and gives a sense of why it appealed to her as a young woman, highlighting how sentimental attachments provided the impetus for her political beliefs. Singing with strangers in devotion to the same cause, in a public space devoted to free speech and open to all—even unaccompanied young women—she found more kinship than she ever would in the rarefied balls of her debutante season. Nothing of this kind appears in The Dazzling Paget Sisters.

Celia’s professional life gets short shrift as well. She worked as assistant editor for the journal Polemic: A Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics, which published George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Stephen Spender. But there is little of the day-to-day labor of an editor, of the challenges and rewards of working with authors, or of the life of the office, the kind of details that enliven publishing memoirs like Robert Gottlieb’s Avid Reader. Instead of getting a sense of what motivated Celia’s work and the intellectual satisfaction she gleaned from it, we’re told that Orwell proposed—at least an affair—and that she kept demurring, put off by his ascetic lifestyle. Celia was later an editorial assistant at Occident, a chaotic production that serially ran out of money. Bankes suggests that the journal continued thanks to Celia’s efforts, but again, there is no clear sense of what exactly those efforts entailed.

Finally, we learn that Celia worked for the Information Research Department (IRD), part of the British Foreign Office. Bankes describes it in fairly lofty terms as an organization dedicated to anti-totalitarianism, but its virulent anticommunism spread warped depictions of the Soviet Union in Britain and had a chilling effect on leftist movements more broadly. As the British counterpart to the Soviet Union’s Cominform, the IRD’s officials created entirely negative, cherry-picked reports about life in the USSR that were then circulated among the British intelligentsia on the understanding that they would reuse this information in their writing, without mentioning the IRD. Thus the public was subject to anticommunist propaganda under the cover of impartial journalism. The IRD later went on to target anticolonialism, attempting to suppress uprisings across the crumbling British Empire in the postwar period.

Bankes does not grapple with the moral ambiguity of Celia’s work for the IRD or the ways in which Koestler’s participation in the project became part of a broader strategy to infiltrate and suppress left-wing political activity. As the scholar Frances Stonor Saunders puts it in her study The Cultural Cold War,

under [Koestler’s] tutelage, the department realized the usefulness of accommodating those people and institutions who, in the tradition of left-wing politics, broadly perceived themselves to be in opposition to the center of power. The purpose of such accommodation was twofold: first, to acquire a proximity to “progressive” groups in order to monitor their activities; second, to dilute the impact of these groups by achieving influence from within or by drawing its members into a parallel—and subtly less radical—forum.

Little of this finds its ways into The Dazzling Paget Sisters, which—barring the inclusion of de Beauvoir’s critical assessment of Koestler—skims over the uglier aspects of the sisters’ circles and the moral ambiguities of the self-described anticommunist left in this period. Bankes recounts that Mamaine met Senator Joseph McCarthy while on a trip to the United States with Koestler and finds him to be a “‘a hairy-pawed thug.’” But, unlike Saunders, she omits that Mamaine also thought “he was doing a rather fine job of exposing ‘infiltrators,’” suggesting that her distaste was aesthetic rather than political at heart. Mamaine also found Malraux in 1948—in full-blown right-wingery—speaking with his “‘usual brilliance.’”

Again and again, the hagiographic tone of the biography obscures the more complicated tales that could be told about these twins and the significance of their lives. What did it mean affectively to be part of the anticommunist left in this period? Were these women conscious that their commitment to anticommunism came with an increasing overlap with conservative thinkers and activists? How did it feel to find former enemies now uneasy—or perhaps even easy—allies? How did dinner table conversation change? What were the contours of their original leftism that it could morph into something sanctioned by the IRD and CIA as a worthy political project? The twins emerge as curiously elusive characters, much of whose inner lives and convictions remain opaque—perhaps a product of an upper-class commitment to blitheness—while Bankes repeatedly struggles to fully account for their social context.

Ultimately, the point of her recovery project is less clear than in the better examples of the “overlooked woman” biography. The revelatory force of feminist analysis evident in Diane Johnson’s work has been lost, along with Johnson’s ability to write convincingly of the submerged importance of previously unknown lives. Bankes has reached a point of diminishing returns in the cottage industry of women’s life writing, so that The Dazzling Paget Sisters feels like a pallid iteration of earlier texts. Altogether, this reader was left wondering if perhaps the twins’ Prufrockian appearances in the margins of other people’s lives was not a historical injustice that needed to be righted.