THE DAZZLING PAGET SISTERS

Sisters’ loves.

Identical twins Celia and Mamaine Paget are the focus of an engaging memoir by Celia’s daughter, who draws on archival sources to create a warm, sensitive portrait of two extraordinary women. The twins grew up in the English countryside under the care of a doting father, widowed when their mother died a week after their birth in 1916. His death when the girls were 11 made them wards of their “imperious and insensitive”—and extremely wealthy—uncle. Sent to boarding schools that they hated, and a Swiss finishing school that they loved, they reluctantly “came out” as debutantes in 1935. Beautiful and vivacious, they aspired to much more than being socialites. In 1937, when they came into an inheritance left by their father, they set themselves up in a London flat and immersed themselves in “a new circle of friends, a different set of values, the wide-open possibility of freedom—to be themselves, to fly in the face of stifling convention, to establish their independence at last.” Not surprisingly—they were strikingly beautiful—they attracted a host of admirers: Celia’s included literary critic Edmund Wilson, philosopher Freddie Ayer, and George Orwell; Mamaine met Arthur Koestler at a party thrown by Cyril Connolly in January 1944 when she was 28 and he, 40. The volatile, hard-drinking Koestler, “the quintessential European, deracinated, almost stateless, a Jewish firebrand,” was the celebrated author of Darkness at Noon. Their often tempestuous liaison lasted six years, during which Mamaine had a passionate affair with Albert Camus. She and Koestler married in 1950 and separated, finally, a year later. Both sisters suffered from lung problems, to which Mamaine succumbed in 1954; Celia died in 2002, leaving her daughter the rich trove of letters, diaries, and photographs that she has judiciously mined.

A captivating dual biography.