Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (Hardcover)

~ Lois Gordon (Author) "Nancy Cunard was the great-granddaughter of Samuel Cunard, the founder of the renowned transatlantic steamship line, and she was brought up with all the privileges..." (more)
Key Phrases: great glare, crazy years, lours press, Nancy Cunard, New York, Spanish Civil War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British-born heiress to the famous steamship fortune, Nancy Cunard (1896–1965) lived an extraordinary life. A famous beauty who became a flamboyant journalist and humanitarian, and an aspiring poet herself, she had such bold-faced lovers as Ezra Pound, who immortalized Cunard in the Cantos, and T.S. Eliot, who characterized her as an immoral siren with literary aspirations in The Waste Land. Edward, prince of Wales, wooed her to no avail; a fashion icon in Roaring '20s Paris, Cunard was photographed by Man Ray and played onscreen by Garbo; and she figured in the works of Waugh and Neruda. Cunard's long poem Parallax was published by the Woolfs' prestigious Hogarth Press, and her own Hours Press published Beckett, Robert Graves and Laura Riding. A scandalous romance with a black American musician severed her from family and inflamed her social conscience; she crusaded for blacks in her mammoth anthology Negro and against Franco's fascism as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Although not written to appeal to a broad audience, this able, diligently researched biography by Fairleigh Dickinson English professor Gordon (coauthor of American Chronicle: Year by Year Through the 20th Century) revives the memory of a remarkable woman against the backdrop of major 20th-century events. Illus. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

Nancy Cunard's life unfolds, by turns, like a dark fairy tale, a tabloid soap opera, and the hagiography of an outlaw saint. Heir to the British Cunard shipping fortune, she grew up in a castle, raised by servants and dependent on literature and nature for solace. Disconcertingly beautiful, brilliant, and artistic, she was plagued by insecurity yet pushed herself to become a poet, publisher, activist, and journalist of conscience. Gordon brings a literary sensibility, a historian's insight, and psychological fluency to her groundbreaking and alternately mesmerizing and shattering biography of this glamorous and self-destructive humanist. Gordon writes compassionately about Cunard's astonishing "capacity for alcohol and affairs," habits that acquired the ferocity of a depraved martyrdom as she collected lovers as easily as she acquired her signature bangles. Ultimately, Cunard--a perpetual traveler and indefatigable and eloquent diary keeper and correspondent--devoted herself to black rights, the Spanish civil war, and fighting fascism at great personal sacrifice. Scandalous, gifted, and, in her own tormented way, heroic, Cunard blazed brightly at the epicenter of a brutal yet creative epoch. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 504 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; 1St Edition edition (April 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231139381
• ISBN-13: 978-0231139380
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #206,959 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nancy Cunard Knew Everyone, March 31, 2007

By	C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Nancy Cunard knew a virtual who's who of the artistic world of the first half of the 20th century before getting embroiled in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. It is a fascinating story of the rich little girl who had everything and who would spend all she had to help the needy in wartime. A hellish haze of alcoholism and mental illness would eventually kill her in 1965. Ms Gordon has written a moderately long account (nearly 450 pages with notes and index) of her advocacy of the defendless and her love affairs with the famous. It is an interesting story for any reader who is familiar with both James Joyce and Langston Hughes, with both the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant job, takes your breath away, May 12, 2007

By	Robert Temple - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a brilliant, sensitive, thoroughly researched biography which is a model example of how such things should be done. The author writes of the First World War experiences in London as if she had personally lived through them. Her understanding of the complex and bizarre Nancy Cunard, of her weird mother, of her strange friends, of her insane promiscuity, of her serial preying upon the creative elite by means of 'genital consumption', of her impossible psychlogy, of the whole phantasmagoria which Nancy Cunard represented, are really a triumph of empathy and insight, as well as of organisation of material. Lois Gordon's ability to master large volumes of action and hysteria without flinching qualify her for a top military command.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Remembered Life, July 2, 2007

By	B. M. Boyer - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If Lois Gordon was writing about a fictional character she could not have told a story of a more exciting person than Nancy Cunard. However, Nancy Cunard was indeed an individual who lived in the early part of last century whose exploits, altruism, and literary talent were extraordinary by any standards. She was a legendary beauty, with a great mind, who was extremely devoted to the disadvantaged people of the world and their struggles. This is an unusual and remarkable combination of qualities that is brilliantly depicted throughout this wonderful book. Simply, I could not put the book down once I had started reading. I can highly recommend it.