It was fashionable to follow the new “-isms” such as Dadaism and Surrealism, but Cunard had an intellect, honed by her great friend, the Irish novelist George Moore. Yet she embraced the new and the anti-establishment - first, it seems, as a bit of a lark. It’s important not to romanticise this scenario: like most so-called Bright Young Things, Cunard was careless of others, shallow, and chronically bored. The American poet William Carlos Williams kept a photo-graph of her in his study and one of her great love affairs was with fellow poet Ezra Pound.

Across the pages of this book traipse a broke Ernest Hemingway, the difficult James Joyce, and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who carved and cast statues of her. In liberal, loose-laced Paris, Cunard found her spiritual home. At the opening of one famed cabaret joint, Le Boeuf sur le Toit, the poet Jean Cocteau tapped the drums while Black musicians hammered on back-to-back pianos, with Pablo Picasso and Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev looking on. In order to escape the confines of home, Nancy upped and married a rich but unsuitable Australian officer, abandoned him, and found herself in a Paris bewitched by jazz. Her poetry began to appear in small intellectual magazines. She drank from an early age and took many to her bed it was, after all, wartime (World War 1, to be exact). Radiantly beautiful, tall, and slender, she was described as “incarnately alluring”. Her father was a baron and her mother a powerful society hostess. Cunard was born into great wealth in the last years of the 19th century, the heiress to the Cunard shipping fortune. In Five Love Affairs and a Friendship: The Paris Life of Nancy Cunard, Icon of the Jazz Age, Anne de Courcy wisely contains this mercurial woman to the 1920s and 1930s in Paris, which allows her to properly examine Cunard’s life at its most thriving, before alcoholism, anorexia, and madness erased her. She was a poet, a publisher, and a muse to significant avant-garde writers and artists, and helped to push African art and artefacts into the European mainstream.

Nancy Cunard led a life that was out of the ordinary, excessive and sybaritic, and yet she used her fortune to fight racism, fascism, and the stultifying mores of her aristocratic class in England.

Love and friendship book summary