Intellectual Giants of 20th Century Come to Life in Portrait of Women They Loved

‘The Dazzling Paget Sisters: The English Twins Who Captivated Literary Europe’By Ariane BankesMcNally Editions, 304 pagesTwin daughters of landed gentry who died young, Celia and Mamaine Paget, were brought up by relatives who saw no reason to educate them. The sisters, feeling bereft of a higher education, tutored themselves and had the added advantage of attracting brilliant men such as George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, and Edmund Wilson, in whose company they thrived sensually and intellectually.Celia’s daughter, Ariane Bankes, draws on her mother’s memories and a trunk of papers that help her to document the loves and friendships of two beautiful women traversing a Europe torn by war and later the Communist menace that Orwell, Koestler, Wilson, and Camus opposed.Mamaine’s troubled marriage to Arthur Koestler shows her to have been an extraordinarily patient and perceptive wife dealing with a sometimes violent man. She does not seem to have known about the women he assaulted, including the wife of his friend, the journalist and Labour politician Michael Foot. Foot’s wife, Jill Craigie, kept secret for years the sordid details of the Koestler rape.The volatile, hard drinking Koestler is contrasted in the life of the twins with the sober and austere George Orwell and the romantic, sensitive Albert Camus. The latter wooed Mamaine and almost won her, losing out only because she could not forsake Koestler, feeling not only a romantic but an intellectual bond.What fortified these sisters was their deep affection for and loyalty to one another. So strong was that sisterly attachment that after Mamaine died, Camus transferred his romantic yearning to Celia – not in the hope that he would win her exactly, but rather that he could perpetuate the rapport and intimacy he had experienced with Mamaine.Mamaine’s letters to Wilson, with whom she corresponded regularly, sums up why no man — however important, attractive, and importunate — could ever quite seduce a Paget sister: “My twinnie relationship is such that I can’t go for long without talking to her [Celia] … indeed I wonder what on earth I would do if K[oestler] and I were to live in the States as we talk of Doing.”Time and space did not matter, so that even when separated and leading married lives, the sisters sustained their union. Only in themselves together did they feel complete — the consequence of those early years when their family supposed them destined to be merely the consorts of beau monde husbands.Beside their beauty, what seems to have made the Paget sisters so enticing was their utter absorption in the ideas and milieu of the men who courted them. As a result, Ms. Bankes does something remarkable by presenting full and moving biographies of Koestler, Camus and Orwell. This is made possible because these men opened themselves up to the Paget sisters, revealing more about themselves, I’m tempted to believe, than to anyone else, female or male.Mamaine died first, and though Celia carried on, her daughter suggests that she never recovered from her sister’s death, the result of an asthma attack and other respiratory problems that plagued both sisters for years.In her introduction, Ms. Bankes explains why to write about the Paget sisters is not simply to present a period piece: “Orwell, Koestler, and Camus were at the epicentre of the great debates of the last century, between communism and anti-communism, freedom and totalitarianism. Although we once thought we had moved on and such titanic struggles would no longer occupy us to the same degree, we are again confronted today by their implications. The simple right to live one’s own life, unchallenged, is not granted to millions the world over who live under repressive regimes. The freedom of the individual against the state is still fiercely contested, as is the right of a democracy such as Ukraine to exist in the face of totalitarian aggression.”What is remarkable about the Paget sisters is that they were brought up to believe they had no choice other than to grace high society gatherings. To make something of themselves, to command the attention of an Orwell, a Koestler, and a Camus, became the something else these sisters sought, the world elsewhere that the heroes of great literature seek.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “To Be A Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie” and “A Private Life of Michael Foot.”

Intellectual Giants of 20th Century Come to Life in Portrait of Women They Loved

Intellectual Giants of 20th Century Come to Life in Portrait of Women They Loved

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