Born in 1896, Nancy was the only child of Sir Bache Cunard, heir to the Cunard shipping line fortune, and Maude Burke, a San Francisco heiress who had tired with the sporting life, moved to London and changed her name to Emerald. Cunard believed deeply in ‘the sacred mission of art to change history’. It was this philosophy that led her, in 1928, to take over the Three Mountains Press, which had previously published work by Hemingway, Pound and William Carlos Williams, renaming it the Hours Press. Hours would continue to publish avant-garde writing throughout the 1920s, including the poems of Samuel Beckett, Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos, and two books by Laura Riding. It was also in 1928 that Cunard began an affair with Henry Crowder, a black American jazz musician. The relationship caused a major scandal, both in the newspapers and with her mother. In 1931, the backlash from her family and the press prompted Cunard to write and publish Black Man and White Ladyship, an essay in which she hit out at the racism of her mother and the wider world. She also edited the massive Negro Anthology, published in 1933, which included poetry, fiction and non-fiction by African-American authors including Louis Armstrong, W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. The anthology featured her own detailed account of the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case, in which nine African American teens were falsely accused and wrongly convicted for the rapes of two white women in Alabama. A staunch defender of the Scottsboro Boys, Cunard founded the British Scottsboro Defense Fund in 1933 — whose members included Andre Gide, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley, among others — and organised demonstrations and a meeting at London’s Shoreditch Town Hall. In the mid-1930s, Cunard trained her fire on the rise of fascism in Europe, writing about Mussolini and the Spanish Civil War, and organising relief missions for Spanish refugees. In 1937 she canvassed 200 leading writers for their opinions on the situation in Spain; 126 of the 147 writers who completed her questionnaire came out in favour of the legal Republican government. Cunard was one of the most vocal anti-fascists of her time. After World War II, which Nancy spent in London translating for the French Resistance, she gave up her home in France and travelled extensively. In 1948, she sailed from Jamaica to England aboard the Empire Windrush. It was a civil rights gesture in solidarity with the first wave of Jamaicans to arrive in Britain to help rebuild a nation decimated by war. ‘It was impossible for her to work quietly for the rights of man,’ said Solita Solano, the American writer, poet and activist who was Cunard’s contemporary in Paris. ‘Nancy functioned best in a state of fury in which, in order to defend, she attacked every windmill in a landscape of windmills.’ Nancy Cunard died in 1957, having suffered from ill-health and mental illness; she is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

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