How Nancy Cunard Set the Standard for the Modern Rebel Heiress
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Almost 100 years before Kim Kardashian was advocating for prison reform, Nancy Cunard was wielding both her fortune and her notoriety for social justice.
A combustible combination of Art Deco chic and aristocratic activist, Cunard made shock waves throughout London society, publicly feuding with her mother—renowned London society hostess Emerald Cunard—and thumbing her nose at almost every conceivable convention of an era not necessarily known for its staidness, even while shielded somewhat by her mother’s reputation and the Cunard shipping line fortune.
“She was dedicated to obliterating the social class to which they all belonged. And I think she meant that,” historian and biographer Laura Thompson says. Cunard is one of a slew of wealthy women prominently featured in Thompson’s delicious new book Heiresses: The Lives of the Million Dollar Babies, alongside Vanderbilts and Huttons and others, stretching back to the 17th century. Cunard’s was a generation dedicated to decadence and refuting their parents’ values—but Cunard often took it to extremes.
A poet, a muse, a publisher, a jewelry fanatic, and a tireless advocate for what we now call the 99 percent, Cunard inspired characters in novels both classic (Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay) and camp (Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat). But her true calling was reforming the world. Today, the tasks Cunard set for herself look depressingly similar to those of Gen Z: Declaring herself an anarchist, Cunard was a dedicated advocate for racial equality as well as a virulent anti fascist.
“Nancy’s got that fierce energy: ‘You’re with me or you’re against me,’” Thompson says. “She’s just the antithesis of the feel of the era and yet she was part of it. So much of it is her look, her style. The Wyndham Lewis head and the Ibizan hound body. But the style with her was also of substance. Her Cubist mind was skewed but honest.”
That personal style has become part of the iconography of the '20s, despite Cunard being a bit older than the Bright Young Things she came to represent. There is the Brancusi sculpture that set an auction record for the artist at Christie’s in 2018, and the striking photos by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton—a gamut of artists that says plenty about Cunard’s wide-ranging circle. In them, Cunard is wearing bracelets stacked from wrist to elbow on both slender arms. But these weren’t just ornamental; Cunard was wearing African-inspired bracelets made out of wood and bone. The sheer perversity, as a Cunard, of opting for such mundane materials was mesmeric. The style caught on and major jewelry companies eventually crafted their own versions of Cunard’s bangles. In precious metals, of course.
At a time when racism wasn’t discussed so much as casually accepted, Cunard breathlessly flew into the fray. For many years in a very public relationship with the Black jazz musician Henry Crowder—she accused her mother of sending policemen to torment them—she held a fundraiser in London for the Scottsboro Boys and, in 1934, edited and published Negro, a mammoth anthology of work from Black writers, including Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. She also included some of the hate mail she received for embarking on the project.
The book was released to shrugs and shortly afterward Cunard was cut off by her mother and threw herself into the Spanish Civil War and the fight against fascism. Her attitude for the rest of her life remained almost masochistically militant, only slightly undercut by her increasing alcoholism and drug use.
Thompson, who hadn’t known much about Cunard when she researched her life for inclusion in Heiresses, recalls discovering the scope of Cunard’s ambition. “To find out how much she really did… that was the very opposite of the virtue signaller,” Thompson says. During World War II, Cunard worked as a translator in London, ignoring sleep and food because, she said, “Somewhere, someone is suffering.” Thompson points to that quote as indicative of how consuming Cunard’s sense of moral justice was, “absolutely trembling with her need to identify with it.”
Anyone who has a passing familiarity with the poor little rich girls of the 20th century can guess how Cunard’s story ends: the sadly archetypal loneliness, alcoholism, and mental imbalance. As Thompson says, pointing to Henry James’s novels, “Heiresses can’t even triumph in fiction! But I felt in a weird way it was quite a cheering book to write because it says a state of relative poverty is OK. You’ve got a kind of freedom these people sometimes struggle to find.”
But as Cunard would immediately reply, kohl-rimmed eyes burning with fierce determination, “I've always had the feeling that everyone alive can [do] something that is worthwhile.”
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