Nancy Clare Cunard (March 10 1896 – March 17 1965) was an English writer, editor and publisher, political activist and poet.
Her father was Sir Bache Cunard, an heir to the Cunard shipping money, interested in polo and fox hunting, and a baronet. Her mother was born Maud Alice Burke (1872-1948), and was an American heiress; as Lady Emerald Cunard, she became a leading London socety hostess, and later celebrated as a friend of Wallis Simpson.
Her parents separated in 1910. Nancy had been brought up on the family estate at Nevill Holt , Leicestershire; at that point she moved to London with her mother. Her education was at various boarding schools, including time in France and Germany.
She made a short-lived marriage during World War I to Sydney Fairbairn, an army officer; it lasted less than two years before they separated. She was also at that time on the edge of The Coterie, associating in particular with Iris Tree. She also contributed to the Sitwell anthology Wheels, providing its title poem; it has been said that the venture was originally her project. She was shortly notorious for wild behaviour, accentuated by her dressing in male clothes. It is said that she never really recovered from the death in France of a lover, Peter Broughton-Adderley, less than a month before Armistice Day.
In 1920 she moved to Paris, where initially she was close to Michael Arlen. A short relationship with Aldous Huxley just before he wrote Antic Hay (1923) led to a portrayal of her in the book, but was of much greater importance to him. She took up literary modernism, with much of her published poetry dating from this period; it has been suggested that she also at this time took up alcohol, drugs, and communist fellow-travelling.
In 1927 she moved into a farmhouse in La Chapelle-Reanville , Normandy. It was there that she set up in 1928 the Hours Press, a small press; previously it had been the Three Mountains Press, run as a hobby by William Bird, an American journalist in Paris, who had already produced work by Ezra Pound. It operated for three years, and first published Samuel Beckett’s work, as well as Pound's initial XXX Cantos. It had a most distinguished list of authors.
From 1928 (on the rebound from a two-year affair with Louis Aragon) she was involved in a relationship with Henry Crowder, an African-American jazz musician who was working in Paris. She became an activist in matters concerning racial politics and civil rights in the USA, including the Scottsboro Boys case, and visited Harlem.
In the 1930s she wrote as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian during the Spanish Civil War; and also was involved in refugee relief. She wrote for Left Review, and compiled the pamphlet Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. She translated poems of Pablo Neruda, with whom she had been living in Madrid.
After World War II she gave up on her home at Reanville, and travelled extensively. She suffered from poor physical and mental health, and died virtually friendless, in Paris.
She may have been told or believed that the novelist George Moore was her natural father.
Works
- Outlaws (1921) poems
- Sublunary (1923) poems
- Parallax (1925) Hogarth Press
- Poems (1930)
- Black Man and White Ladyship (1931) polemic pamphlet
- Negro (1934) anthology of African-American literature and art, editor
- Authors Take Sides (1937) pamphlet, compiler
- Los poetas del mundo defienden al pueblo español (1937, Paris) editor with Pablo Neruda
- Poems for France (1944)
- Releve into Marquis (1944)
- Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas (1954)
- GM: Memories of George Moore (1956)
- These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville and Paris, 1928-1931 (1969) autobiography
References
- Those Remarkable Cunards, Emerald and Nancy (1968) Daphne Fielding
- Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel 1896-1965 (1968) edited by Hugh Ford
- Nancy Cunard: A Biography (1979) Anne Chisholm
- Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank (2001) Andrea Weiss
External link