Review by Booklist Review
Seasoned British biographer de Courcy (Chanel's Riviera, 2020) lavishly portrays the flamboyant English heiress, poet, publisher, and activist Nancy Cunard. A neglected only child, Cunard cultivated toxic hostility towards her famous socialite mother and the conventions she embraced. Armed with steely beauty and ingrained senses of style and entitlement, Cunard dedicated herself to alcohol, partying, and sex in 1920s Paris. Prowling the enclaves of cutting-edge art and literature, she acquired and cast off lovers like evening gowns while conducting consequential if tormented love affairs with Michael Arlen, Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Louis Aragon, and Henry Crowder, an African American jazz pianist. De Courcy tracks every turn in these fraught entanglements along with Cunard's passion for African art and evolving social consciousness as she traveled incessantly, became the first to publish Samuel Beckett, and created Negro, a massive, groundbreaking anthology about Black life. De Courcy offers a fresh perspective on a legendary time and place via profiles of fascinating individuals caught in her subject's web, presenting Cunard herself in all her turbulent complexity, controversy, epic selfishness, debilitating vulnerability and rage, lashing intelligence, and tragic self-destructiveness.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Nancy Cunard (1896--1965), the glamorous and unconventional great-granddaughter of the founder of the Cunard shipping line, takes center stage in this luminous biography from de Courcy (Chanel's Riviera). A legendary beauty regularly photographed by Man Ray, Cunard rejected the cultural mores of the British aristocracy and refused common definitions of fidelity in favor of a "buccaneering attitude to sex." After moving to Paris in 1920 and falling under the influence of modernism and surrealism, Cunard had love affairs with authors Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen, and Louis Aragon, and jazz pianist Henry Crowder. Founder of the Hours Press, Cunard was a muse as well as a publisher, and made Black culture the "central cause of her life." She spent three years assembling Negro, a 1933 anthology of works "by and about black people" and raised funds to support the Scottsboro Boys, who were wrongly accused of rape in the U.S. Her attraction to African culture could also be seen--and heard--in her signature accessory, ivory bracelets that ringed both arms from wrist to bicep. Physical and mental health woes exacerbated by "a lifetime of alcohol, smoking, and barely eating" made Cunard's last days "appallingly sad," but de Courcy does justice to her subject's glory years. It's a seductive portrait of life lived to the fullest. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This bed-hopping biography by de Courcy (Chanel's Riviera) does an excellent job conveying the reckless, decadent Jazz Age in Paris, but it somehow fails to bring to life its subject: hard-living, free-loving heiress Nancy Cunard (1896--1965). Paris in the 1920s was a haven for U.S. and UK expatriates eager to live a creative, bohemian life that wasn't possible at home. Chafing under the restrictions of upper-class British society and striking out at her mother, Maud "Emerald" Cunard, Nancy escaped to Paris in 1920. There she lived as she wanted and took (and discarded) many lovers, including Ezra Pound and Aldous Huxley. Her involvement with U.S. musician Henry Crowder opened her eyes to anti-Black racism, spurred her to take on an activist role, and permanently severed her relationship with Emerald. VERDICT Readers who are curious about Cunard's dissipation and decline or the "post-Nancy" lives of her many friends and lovers will appreciate this book's lengthy bibliography. A good accompaniment to the multitude of other books about the Lost Generation and 1920s Paris.--Liz French
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The turbulent and complicated romantic life of legendary flapper Nancy Cunard (1896-1965). In her latest, de Courcy, a prolific social historian and author of Chanel's Riviera and The Husband Hunters, among other books, focuses on bewitching shipping heiress Cunard's famous lovers and a key, long-lasting friendship with her mother's lover, the Irish writer George Moore. The author also provides incisive profiles of her lovers. Drawing on Cunard's revealing diaries, de Courcy zeros in on her 14 years living in the exciting milieu of Jazz Age Paris. The brilliant, independence-seeking Cunard lived an unconventional, remarkable life. She hastily married in 1916, but the relationship lasted less than two years, and her life became a promiscuous, boozy adventure tempered with writing poetry and lamenting the early death of a lover. In 1920, she escaped to Paris. "It was not long," writes the author, "before Nancy, rich, gorgeous-looking and stylish…became one of the icons" of the Roaring '20s and a muse to Michael Arlen, author of the popular The Green Hat, whose heroine was modeled on Nancy. Early on, Cunard met the flamboyant, married Ezra Pound, who had his own affairs. Unlike Arlen, de Courcy notes, she deeply loved him for five or six years. It wasn't reciprocated, but they remained friends. She moved on to numerous cities and the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis, and then to Robert McAlmon, the American writer and influential publisher. Unlike Pound, Aldous Huxley fell "desperately and obsessively" in love with Cunard, but his wife put a firm end to it. Her next lover was Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and they shared a "light-hearted and fun" affair. After Tzara, Cunard experienced an "intense" and doomed "passionate" relationship with poet Louis Aragon. In 1928, Cunard founded the Hours Press, which published Samuel Beckett's first poem, "Whoroscope," and had the "most important love affair" of her life, with Henry Crowder, a married Black jazz pianist. Under his influence, she would later publish Negro, her own groundbreaking anthology about African American history, art, and politics. A fulsome portrait of a quixotic, disruptive, talented woman. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
