Nancy Clara Cunard

Background

Nancy Cunard was born on March 10, 1896, in Leicestershire, United Kingdom. She was the daughter of Bache, an heir to the Cunard Line shipping businesses, and Maud Cunard, a leading London society hostess. Nancy Cunard moved to Paris in 1920.

Education

Nancy Cunard studied at various boarding schools, including time in France and Germany.

Career

Once famous for her bohemian lifestyle and her association with avant-garde literary, artistic, and political circles, Nancy Cunard wrote poetry that was influenced by Georgian and emerging modernist traditions. As an advocate for African and African-American culture and literature, in 1934, Cunard compiled and published an eight-hundred-page collection of black writings called Negro Anthology. The anthology includes many photographs and the writings of well-known black writers of the day, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, and Langston Hughes. The book contains not only works of poetry but essays and articles that address the topics and issues that were affecting blacks during the early twentieth century. Also, Cunard contributed six essays and a poem titled "Southern Sheriff," which criticizes racism in the American South.

In 1916 Nancy Cunard's first published poems had appeared in an anthology series titled Wheels, the title of which was taken from one of her poems. Other contributors to the series, which was published by Edith Sitwell, included Aldous Huxley and Cunard's longtime friend Iris Tree. Five years later, Cunard published Outlaws, her first book of verse, which included thirty-one new poems and five that had appeared in Wheels. Several literary critics and scholars considered Cunard's third volume, Parallax, to be her most impressive work as a poet. The central theme of the poem is alienation and yearning for some of belonging in a world that Cunard thought was unraveling. Despite the praise she received from many of her contemporary critics, later readers have largely neglected Cunard's poetry. Some scholars, however, feel that her writings should not be forgotten because they offer a unique perspective on some of the most significant issues of her time.

Between 1928 and 1931, Nancy Cunard owned and operated a publishing company in La Chapelle-Réanville, France, called the Hours Press. She used the press to publish high-quality small editions of prose and poetry that the commercial publishers didn't interest. Some of the better-known authors who published works with the press included Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett. During the Spanish Civil War, Cunard worked as a news correspondent for the Associated Negro Press. She also collaborated with Chilean poet Pablo Neruda on a pamphlet that helped support the Spanish Republicans in their war against the fascist forces. Several of Cunard's books were published in the years following World War II, including three volumes of memoirs. One of these volumes, These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville, and Paris, 1928-1931, was published posthumously in 1966.

Nancy Cunard's bohemian lifestyle not only led Cunard into numerous romantic liaisons, both temporary, and long-term but also encouraged her excessive drinking. At the end of her life, she experienced repeated bouts of drunken paranoia that led to run-ins with the police, and eventually, an ordered stay at a sanatorium. The drinking also took a serious on Cunard's health, and she died at the age of sixty-nine on March 16, 1965, in Paris, France.

Achievements

• Nancy Cunard was widely known as a writer. One of her best-known anthology, Negro, compiled a wide range of writing on art and politics of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. She also wrote poetry. Additionally, Nancy Cunard was a founder of the Hours Press in La Chapelle-réanville in France.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Negro

    (In its subject and international approach, Negro was gene...)

    1934
  • These Were the Hours

    (The book was published after Nancy Cunard's death in 1965.)

    1969
  • Poems of Nancy Cunard

    (The book was published after Nancy Cunard's death in 1965.)

    2005
  • Selected Poems

    (The book was published after Nancy Cunard's death in 1965.)

    2016
  • Outlaws 1921
  • Sublunary 1923
  • Parallax 1925
  • Poems 1930
  • Black Man and White Ladyship 1931
  • Los poetas del mundo defienden al pueblo español 1937
  • The White Man's Duty 1942
  • Poems for France 1947
  • Releve Into Maquis 1944
  • Grand Man 1954
  • GM 1956

Politics

Having lived through World War I, Nancy Cunard railed against the rise of fascist political movements in Italy, Germany, and Spain. In the mid-1930s, her anti-fascist fight included writing about Mussolini's annexation of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War. Cunard was pretty active in matters concerning racial politics and civil rights in the United States. Also, she defined herself as an anarchist.

Views

Nancy Cunard was a tremendous advocate of African and African-American culture and literature, and, of course, she strongly promoted against racism.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Chris Hopkins: "Her reputation is better remembered than her poetry, but her life and work are closely linked: both show a progression from a wish to shock and a rejection of old meanings to a search for new and valuable insights."

Connections

Nancy Cunard married Sydney Fairburn in November 1916 and divorced in 1925.

Father:

Bache Cunard

Mother:

Maud Alice Cunard

Maud Cunard's maiden name was Burke.

colleague:

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

Ezra Pound was an American poet and critic, a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any other single figure to advance a "modern" movement in English and American literature.

colleague:

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He was perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century.

Ex-husband:

Sydney George Fairbairn

Sydney Fairbairn was an English cricketer and British Army officer.

colleague:

Samuel Barclay Beckett

Samuel Beckett was a French author, critic, and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

References

• Nancy Cunard: A Biography
  1979