The Quality of Love
Duckworth 288pp £18.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99
Mamaine and Celia Paget were a pair of “dazzlingly beautiful identical twins” who were born in 1916, came out in London society in their late teens, and became famous for their entanglements with “some of the most brilliant minds of the past century”, said Anne de Courcy in The Spectator. “The list of their friends reads like a roll call of literary notables”: Cyril Connolly, Bertrand Russell, Laurie Lee. Mamaine spent five years with (and was briefly married to) the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler – most famous for exposing the horrors of Stalinism in his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon. While with Koestler, she also had an affair with Albert Camus. Celia was proposed to by George Orwell and was a lover of the “formidably clever Oxford philosopher Freddie Ayer”. After Celia’s death in 2002 (Mamaine had died, aged just 37, in 1954), her daughter, Ariane Bankes, “opened a large, battered black tin trunk” and found it stuffed with diaries and letters that provided a “virtually complete record of the twins’ lives”. Now, using this haul, she has written a fascinating joint biography of her mother and aunt.
The twins, whose mother died a week after their birth, were brought up by their loving father in a “rural idyll” in Suffolk, said Sarah Watling in The Daily Telegraph. But he also died, when they were 12; and they became wards of a wealthy uncle, who sent them to boarding school. Soon after being unwillingly “launched” as debs – “Oh, the boredom,” Celia recalled – Mamaine began an affair with the painter Dick Wyndham, who introduced them to the arty milieu that proved their natural habitat.
Lacking much by way of a formal education, the Paget twins were autodidacts who got by largely on “impulse and intuition”, said D.J. Taylor in Literary Review. This perhaps made it easy for them to be “ready victims of male entitlement”: Mamaine spent several years cooped up in a damp Welsh farmhouse with Koestler, diligently typing his manuscripts; Celia was briefly married to a “drunken Irish screenwriter named Patrick Kirwan”. Although the Pagets were undoubtedly “too much under the spell of their Great Men”, I relished reading about them, said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. Bankes sketches her characters so effortlessly that “you see them, and even smell them (Orwell reeks of sardines)”; and it’s “startling” to encounter Camus, correcting the proofs of The Plague, while waiting for Mamaine to arrive. Bankes has produced a “rather delicious and sympathetic” portrait of these “adorable and original” women.