Described as “the queen of the jazz age” and “a fashionable poor little rich girl and muse”, this heiress to the Cunard shipping fortue took being bohemian to new heights. Variously a muse, patron and mistress of many writers and artists, amongst them Aldous Huxley, Ezra Pound, Louis Aragon, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Constantin Brâncusi and Oskar Kokoschka, Nancy Cunard “smoke and drank dramatically” and was well known for wearing African ivory bracelets from her wrist to her elbow. A campaigner and leading member of the anti-fascist movement, Cunard was committed to a mental asylum at the end of her life after a fight with the police but all that knew her concluded that her “stunning beauty” endured to the end.
![Evelyn McHale (1923 – 1947) – Little is known about what drove Evelyn McHale to jump from the Empire State Building and be captured in the “most beautiful suicide [photograph] ever” on 1st May 1947.](https://b1779429.smushcdn.com/1779429/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Evelyn-McHale-FI.jpg?lossy=1&strip=1&webp=0)
