Nancy Cunard (1896–1965)

Nancy Cunard was born in London to an extremely wealthy family. Her father Sir Bache Cunard was an heir to the Cunard Line shipping businesses, and her mother "Emerald" Maud Burke was an American heiress and society leader. Nancy was brought up isolated on the family estate at Nevill Holt, Leicestershire, but in 1911, when her parents separated, she moved to London with her mother. She was educated at various boarding schools, including in France and Germany. In 1916, at age 20, she married Sydney Fairbairn, a professional cricket player; the couple separated in 1919 and divorced in 1925.

Nancy was introduced by her friend Iris Tree to The Coterie, a fashionable group of aristocrats and intellectuals of the period.

She contributed the title poem to the anthology Wheels, edited by the literary Sitwell siblings. In 1920, she moved to Paris,
where she became involved with literary Modernism, Surrealists, and Dada. Much of the poetry she wrote was published during this period of her life. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound, Louis Aragon, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. For example, she was the model for the character Myra Viveash in Antic Hay (1923) and for Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point (1928).

In 1927, Nancy moved into a farmhouse in La Chapelle-Réanville, Normandy, where in 1928 she established
a publishing company called The Hours Press. Her inherited wealth allowed her to take financial risks on unknown and experimental authors that other publishers could not. The Hours Press became known for its beautiful book designs and high-quality production.

It brought out the first separately published work of Samuel Beckett, a poem called Whoroscope (1930); Bob Brown's Words; and Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos. Nancy also published old friends like George Moore, Norman Douglas, Richard Aldington, and Arthur Symons, Laura Riding, John Rodker, Roy Campbell, Harold Acton, Brian Howard and Walter Lowenfels. Nancy had a romantic relationship with Henry Crowder, an African-American jazz musician working in Paris, and became an activist for racial justice and civil rights in the USA. She edited the massive volume Negro Anthology, collecting poetry, fiction, and nonfiction primarily by African-American writers, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
In the mid-1930s she took up the anti-fascist fight as well.

In 1937, she published a series of pamphlets of war poetry, including works by W.H. Auden, Tristan Tzara, and Pablo Neruda. After World War II, she gave up her home in Normandy and traveled extensively. In 1956, she published a memoir called GM: Memories of George Moore, who had been her intellectual mentor. In her later years, Nancy suffered from mental illness and poor physical health, worsened by alcoholism, poverty, and self-destructive behavior. In March 1965, she was found on the street in Paris and brought to the Hôpital Cochin, where she died two days later.