Anne de Courcy

The identical twins who captivated literary London

Intelligent and beautiful, Celia and Mamaine Paget were loved by some of the greatest writers of the interwar years, but remained uniquely devoted to each other

Celia and Mamaine Paget in their court gowns, 1935. [Alamy] 
issue 27 April 2024

The dazzlingly beautiful identical twins Mamaine and Celia Paget were born in 1916 and brought up in rural Suffolk – not the greatest springboard, you would think, for lives at the intellectual heart of the mid-20th century. Yet the list of their friends reads like a roll call of literary notables: Dick Wyndham, Peter Quennell, Cyril Connolly, Bertrand Russell, Sacheverell Sitwell and Laurie Lee. Between them, the twins were proposed to by, among others, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell; had liaisons with Albert Camus and the formidably clever Oxford philosopher Freddie Ayer; quarrelled with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; and received love sonnets from the historian and poet Robert Conquest.

At the heart of this book, however, lies the girls’ twinship. Each was the most important person in the life of the other. Fortunately, those were the days when people wrote, and kept, letters, so that after Celia’s death her daughter Ariane Bankes, this book’s author, opened a large, battered black tin trunk to find it stuffed with diaries and correspondence.

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