I was obsessed with Lady Brett Ashley when I was fourteen, cutting my hair and buying a beret just like hers. Later in high school I learned of Lady Cunard herself, and emulated her stacks of ivory bracelets.
"Hemingway, some believed, fashioned Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises on Lady Nancy Cunard (rather than on Duff Twysden), and she is the indisputable heroine of novels by Aldous Huxley (Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point), Michael Arlen (The Green Hat, Piracy and Lily Christine, among others), Wyndham Lewis (The Roaring Queen), Louis Aragon (Blanche, ou l'oubli, and Le Con d'Irene), and Evelyn Waugh (Unconditional Surrender), and of plays by Tristan Tzara (Mouchoir de nuage) and Huxley (The Gioconda Smile). . . . She was the subject of a section of T.S. Eliot's original draft of The Waste Land and a figure in Ezra Pound's Cantos, Pablo Neruda's Spanish Civil War poems ('Waltz'), and numerous memoirs and poems by Kay Boyle and William Carlos Williams, as well as the focus of many respected writers who are lesser known today. . . . The following from Richard Aldington's short story 'Now Lies She there: An Elegy,' typifies the way most writers introduced her persona:
"'Constance is . . . the wreck of a noble woman . . . In destroying herself, she destroyed plenty of others . . . She was lovely enough to seduce a saint.'"
Link: The poor little rich girl who scandalized literature-Books-The Washington Times, America's Newspaper.
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