Her brother, Charles Eric Side, of Goldfield Mill House (next to Goldfield Mill),[3] Tring, Hertfordshire, a quantity surveyor and Civil Engineer in Chief in the Royal Navy, was married to Malvin, sister of Nathan Isaacs, a metal merchant and educational psychologist whose first wife was the psychologist and psychoanalyst Susan Sutherland Fairhurst, headmistress of the experimental Malting House School, Cambridge.
Charles and Malvin Side's grandson, philosopher Timothy Williamson, was appointed Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford in 2000.
[18] The poet and writer Carol Bergé recalled the "companionable" Pippett as "very encouraging to (her) writing" when they met in New York in the late 1950s whilst staying at the Hotel Albert.
Sackville-West, who "had formed a strong link" with Aileen Pippett, "fulminated against (Woolf) selling Virginia's manuscripts to America", writing "What an odd man he is.
[24] Susan Hudson Fox suggests that Leonard Woolf "shaped his wife's authorial persona, her literary reputation, in a way that would bring her (and him) the most favor", noting in relation to this his disapproval of Pippett's quotation from the letters.
[20][26][27] The Ladies' Home Journal observed "Virginia Woolf enthusiasts will be glad to know that the new biography about her, THE MOTH AND THE STAR, by Aileen Pippett, is worthy of its subject", noting that its use of her letters to Sackville-West allows the reader to "listen in on the intimacies of one of the most esoteric circles in London's long literary history";[28] The Library Journal wrote "'Fragile as a moth and enduring as a star' is Mrs Pippett's way of describing Virginia Woolf, and for that very insight she will endear herself to the many readers of V.W., who will welcome this first long biography of the writer who has enchanted and puzzled readers for many years".
[32] The writing style and tone of the book, despite some praise at the time of publication, was later criticised, as was what later assessments observed to be a lack of rigorous reference to materials and less-than-strict adherence to subsequently-established facts: Studies in Literature observed it to be "beautifully written but sometimes sparsely documented";[33] Kirkus Reviews, contrasting it with Quentin Bell's 1972 biography, "purely historical", criticised its "sometimes numinous sentimentality" and "admitted disregard for what [Pippett] called 'literal facts'".
[37] Aileen Side married firstly, in 1918, William Harry Brice Mears (1888-1965), MBE, of Pyrford, Surrey, a chartered accountant and Grade 3 official of the Ministry of Labour and National Service.
[38][39][40] Her second husband, Roger Samuel Pippett (1895-1962), of Wallington, Surrey, was a literary critic, journalist (with the Daily Herald from 1925 to 1938, and on the staff of Picture News, the PM Sunday magazine) and clerk at the Royal Institute of Chemistry who had served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit during the Second World War.