Her mother was an Englishwoman, Isabelle Bessie Wieniawski (née Hampton),[2] the niece of Irish pianist and composer George Alexander Osborne (who studied under Johann Peter Pixis, François-Joseph Fétis and Friedrich Kalkbrenner and was a close friend of Frédéric Chopin and Hector Berlioz) and a member of a London family that had had associations with Rossini, Meyerbeer, Jenny Lind, Michael William Balfe and Anton Rubinstein.

However, this seems to be an error caused by some earlier sources stating she was born in May 1880 rather than May 1879; her father died on 31 March 1880, in Moscow, while on a concert tour, when Irene was ten months old.

She told her official biographers that she entered the Brussels Conservatoire at age 12, studying piano with Pierre Storck and composition with François-Auguste Gevaert.

[1] In 1901, she married a descendant of the 1st Duke of Marlborough,[6] Sir Aubrey Edward Henry Dean Paul, 5th Bt[7] (19 October 1869 – 16 January 1961)[8] to whom she had been introduced by Nellie Melba.

She accompanied Émile Chaumont in the premiere of her Violin Sonata in D minor, which was dedicated to Octave Maus, and was then performed in Paris by her close friend, the French pianist Lazare Lévy, whom she had met in Miss Ellis's class.

In 1919, at the Queen's Hall, Henry Wood accompanied Poldowski at the premiere of her piano and orchestra piece, "Pat Malone's Wake".

Her opera Silence was premiered in London on 29 March 1920 as part of the Komisarjevsky-Rosing Russian Matinee Season at the Duke of York's Theatre.

[1] She returned to London in 1922; her regular visitors included playwright Alfred Sutro, mezzo-soprano Marguerite d'Alvarez, conductor Eugène Goossens, fils, harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, violinist Paul Kochanski[1] and the composers Peter Warlock and George Gershwin.

[16][17] Her 1923 series of midday recitals at the Hyde Park Hotel, known as The International Concerts of La Libre Esthétique, attracted Arthur Rubinstein, Jacques Thibaud and the London String Quartet.

[18] A recording of the complete cycle by Ensemble 1904,[19] featuring the unpublished 22nd song Nous deux (Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d'été),[20] was to be released by Resonus Classics in 2017.