The Dazzling Paget Sisters by Ariane Bankes

What elusive quality is it that propels people into the centre of things? My mother, Celia Paget, and her identical twin sister Mamaine seemed to possess that quality, to gravitate towards the very heart of the era in which they lived. Born in 1916 and brought up in relative simplicity in rural Suffolk, their lives became entangled with some of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, whether as friends or lovers, muses or wives.

The Paget sisters were identical twins who went from reluctant debutantes to society darlings, eventually becoming enmeshed in the social circles of England's greatest mid-century authors. Celia was a longtime lover of George Orwell, while her twin sister Mamaine was the lover and eventually wife of Orwell's friend and intellectual rival Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian emigre known for his novel Darkness at Noon. Mamaine carried on a brief, torrid affair with Albert Camus, and around the margins of their lives other literary greats hung: Beauvoir and Sartre, of course, as well as Andre Malraux and others. The Dazzling Paget Sisters, written by Celia's daughter Ariane Bankes, seeks to discover what it is that drew her mother and aunt "into the centre of things."

What that "elusive quality" was, I'm not quite sure. Apparently (as one can tell easily from the cover) both twins were quite beautiful, and they had a kind of twinly, otherworldly connection with each other. The question seems like a powerful one--why would these two ordinary girls from Suffolk end up so wrapped up with the century's literary greats?--but Bankes' biography mostly has the effect of demythologizing the very question she poses. The answer seems to be part privilege and part happenstance: the girls were "picked up" by a society maven named Dick Wyndham, who introduced them to these writers. As the story of their lives unfolded, I began to understand their lives not as a series of unlikely brushes with greatness, but something more ordinary: these writers, of course, all knew each other, and it stands to reason that their social circle included people who weren't writers.

What I enjoyed most about The Dazzling Paget Sisters was learning more about the emerging tensions between this circle as the Cold War began. Koestler in particular, who modeled Darkness at Noon on the Soviet gulag, spared no mercy for his fellow writers who let their Socialist sympathies lead them toward the USSR. This led to both Koestler and Mamaine becoming, half-willingly, useful operatives for the CIA, something I wish the book had explored in more detail. And I was interested, of course--who wouldn't be--in the doomed romantic dalliance between Mamaine and Camus, under Koestler's nose. But mostly, I felt that The Dazzling Paget Sisters might have been better served by an author other than Celia's daughter, who approaches the material in a hyper-faithful chronological way that never quite penetrates the surface. It made me wonder if someone with more of an outside perspective, with less loyalty to the letter of the story, might have found a way in to the real "centre of things."