Volume 12, Number 8 · April 24, 1969
Spirits
By Jean Stafford
Being Geniuses Together
by Kay Boyle, by Robert McAlmon
Doubleday, 392 pp., $6.95
Those Remarkable Cunards, Emerald and Nancy
by Daphne Fielding
Atheneum, 205 pp., $6.50
Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel
edited by Hugh Ford
Chilton, 383 pp., $12.50
Nancy Cunard was a paradigm of the Twenties so assiduously accurate in her ingredients and measurements as to be a parody, and it is not surprising that she served as the model for numerous portraits of girls in the fiction of the period, most notably as Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point and Iris March in The Green Hat. By the time she was ready to kick over the traces, her qualifications were in order. The only child of a beautiful and spirited American mother and an English country squire who fancied fox-hounds and topiary, Nancy was brought up in a vast umbrageous house, Nevill Holt, in Northamptonshire. Lady Cunard (who was to change her name from Maud to Emerald) was bored by foxiana and hippoculture and she was bored by motherhood; she evaded the first two by staying indoors reading (she read Surtees as a concession to her husband but would rather have read Zola) and rearranging the furniture; and she dodged the last by consigning her daughter to governesses who were advocates of cold baths and tepid porridge.
Review, 2736 words
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