Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 921 BINGHAM | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 BINGHAM | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families in the American South, Henrietta Bingham was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead, she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character: intoxicating and intoxicated, selfish and shameless, seductive and brilliant, endearing and often terribly troubled. In New York, Louisville, and London, she drove both men and women wild with desire, and her youth blazed with sex. But her love affairs with women made her the subject of derision and caused a doctor to try to cure her queerness. After the speed and pleasure of her early days, the toxicity of judgment from others coupled with her own anxieties resulted in years of addiction and breakdowns. And perhaps most painfully, she became a source of embarrassment for her family-she was labeled "a three-dollar bill." But forebears can become fairy-tale figures, especially when they defy tradition and are spoken of only in whispers. For the biographer and historian Emily Bingham, the secret of who her great-aunt was, and just why her story was concealed for so long, led to Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham .
Henrietta rode the cultural cusp as a muse to the Bloomsbury Group, the daughter of the ambassador to the United Kingdom during the rise of Nazism, the seductress of royalty and athletic champions, and a pre-Stonewall figure who never buckled to convention. Henrietta's audacious physicality made her unforgettable in her own time, and her ecstatic and harrowing life serves as an astonishing reminder of the stories lying buried in our own families.
Author Notes
Emily Bingham was born on July 20, 1981. She earned a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and frequently teaches at Centre College. She is the author of Mordecai: An Early American Family, and the coeditor of The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After. In 2016, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction for her book, Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In lovely prose, historian Bingham (Mordecai: An Early American Family) draws readers behind the veil of silence surrounding her great-aunt Henrietta, who was part of a wealthy, politically influential Kentucky family. Henrietta was very young when her mother died, and navigated a difficult, nearly incestuous relationship with her narcissistic father. She met her first love, the composition professor Mina Kerstein, at Smith College in the early 1920s. They subsequently spent time in England, where Mina, intellectually intrigued by their mutual sexual desires, arranged for their psychoanalysis with a Freudian doctor. Bingham is at her best when describing Henrietta's conflicted feelings about her sexuality as she drifted into acquaintance with the Bloomsbury literary crowd and had affairs with both men and women, including artist Dora Carrington and future producer/actor John Houseman. But Henrietta comes across as less interesting than the company she kept, a minor character overshadowed by the much larger personalities and events of the 20th century. Though the story is weighed down by the minutiae of Henrietta's life and fails to offer much insight on her era, it succeeds as a psychological study of an unusual woman. Illus. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Wealthy and privileged Henrietta Bingham could have accepted the helm of a publishing empire in Louisville, Kentucky, offered by her obsessive father. Instead, she carried on the scandalous life of an F. Scott Fitzgerald character, including alcoholism, drug addiction, and lesbian love affairs. But she was also as unforgettably mesmerizing to her lovers, male and female, as she was willfully overlooked by her scandalized family, as author Bingham discovered of the long-hidden life of her great-aunt. Bingham draws on a trove of material to offer a compelling portrait of a woman who defied social conventions, heartily embracing the Jazz Age and becoming one of the few Americans accepted in London's Bloomsbury set as well as an early subject of a psychoanalytic attempt to treat homosexuality. Henrietta tempted royalty, socialites, and athletic champions in a life of audacity and self-destructive impulses rooted in a traumatic childhood. With rich detail, historian Bingham renders a portrait of an unforgettable woman long buried in her family history.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT'S HARD to resist a biography with a preface that features the discovery of attic trunks filled with nearly 200 beribboned love letters, a first edition of Virginia Woolf's "The Years" and a court ensemble once owned by the 1930s shorts-wearing rebel tennis star Helen Jacobs. Such was the luck of Emily Bingham when she set to exhuming the brittle bones of her Great-aunt Henrietta, whose ghost threaded around the outskirts of the author's privileged Kentucky childhood. The letters were from two men her sexually adventurous great-aunt had been involved with, the Bloomsbury sculptor Stephen Tomlin and the Hollywood producer-actor John Houseman. Notes from the women she loved far more - Helen Jacobs, her Smith professor Mina Kirstein, the painter Dora Carrington, the actress Hope Williams - weren't, Bingham suspects, safe to save. Henrietta's worldliness was a byproduct of trauma: Her Louisville-elite mother was killed while crossing a train track; the 12-year-old Henrietta was also in the car. Her father, Judge Robert Worth Bingham, inherited a fortune when, three years later, in 1916, he married the widow of Henry M. Flagler, the Standard Oil baron and Palm Beach developer, who promptly died under murky, Michael Jacksonesque circumstances involving a shady doctor and copious narcotics. "Bing" later bought The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times, jump-starting the family's media empire. There have been several volumes about the Binghams, including the tell-all "Passion and Prejudice: A Family Memoir" by the author's aunt Sallie Bingham, but none detail Henrietta's life, and the best way to delve into "Irrepressible" is to know nothing about her. This makes you susceptible to one of the book's greatest charms: Before you quite realize what's happened, you're utterly beguiled by a woman who, in the end, effected little. In this, Emily has replicated in a reading experience what knowing Henrietta might have been like. On her father's (many) dimes, the marcelled and bobbed social butterfly introduced London's literary set to Southern black music, served as a case study of "inverts" for the psychoanalyst Ernst Jones, acted as the de facto social secretary while her father was Franklin Roosevelt's first ambassador to the United Kingdom (putting Soufflé Henrietta on the menu). But Henrietta Bingham's greatest achievement was making people fall in love with her. Thus she offers a delicious excuse to be back in a time and among a group in which love was celebrated with gratifying complexity and tenderness. The bisexual Bloomsburian David Garnett told his daughter that when he took Bingham to bed, "she blushed all over her body." This allusion to orgasmic capacity might explain some of her appeal, along with her Amazonian frame and "violet-blue eyes, the memory of which," Houseman wrote in a memoir, "used to turn my bowels to water." Tomlin wrote that "thoughts of her were like a mob of starlings always at my head, their cries in my ears, their feathers choking me." And here's Jacobs, in one of the few letters from female lovers that did survive: "You can do and say nothing to stop the constant flow of deep and growing love that goes out to you from my heart every time I look at you." But just as restless Henrietta seemed about to set up house with her tennis-star girlfriend, the pre-Code mores of semi-accepted lesbianism gave way, in the 1940s and '50s, to virulent repression. This coincided with the death of Henrietta's father, and the lively huntress's glow was eclipsed by both her orphaned state and the liquor she drank to forget it. You can read "Irrepressible" strictly for plot because Bingham, with a few faltering attempts to extrapolate too much psychic import from too little material and mistimed writerliness ("Seconal, Dormitol and Dormison ... pharmaceuticals have their own cold poetry"), propels us along at the exhilarating clip of the sporty Sunbeam in which Henrietta drove her Bloomsbury friends around the British countryside. Its literary value, though, is that of an attenuated tragedy, reminding us of our continuing failure to help people, wealthy or poor, who can't quite survive life, even as they try valiantly to live it. MIRANDA PURVES is a former editor in chief of Flare magazine in Canada.
Kirkus Review
A colorful portrait of a daring woman.F. Scott Fitzgerald never invented a Jazz-Age seductress as bold, brash, and devastating as Henrietta Bingham (1901-1968), the author's great-aunt. A biographer and historian, Bingham (Mordecai: An Early American Family, 2003, etc.) discovered a cache of love letters sent to Henrietta by two ardent suitors. One was John Houseman, not yet a noted director and producer. Most of Henrietta's lovers, though, were women: Mina Kirstein (sister of ballet impresario Lincoln and lover of Clive Bell), who had been her teacher at Smith College; Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington, who experienced "ecstasy" in Henrietta's arms; Wimbledon tennis champion Helen Jacobs, with whom Henrietta had an affair lasting several years; actress Beatrix Lehmann, sister of novelist Rosamund and Hogarth Press editor John; and many others. Henrietta was, apparently, irresistible; she "could beguile brilliant and creative people," the author notes, but her affairs, which "began passionatelyrarely held her attention.With one lover after another Henrietta acted skittish and immature, ambivalent and distant." Her behavior was likely shaped by her relationship with her wealthy and powerful father, emotionally, but not physically incestuous, characterized by "mutual obsession and dependency." He repeatedly offered her careers that would have ensconced her in her native Kentucky, and she repeatedly refused. Yet when he was made Franklin Roosevelt's ambassador to England, Henrietta reveled in aristocratic life and often served as his hostess. The "seductiveness and ambivalence" Henrietta felt toward her father contributed to a lifetime of neuroses, which she sought to alleviate through treatment with Freudian psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, who became her mentor and confidant and who freely shared details of Henrietta with Mina, also his analysand. As she aged, Henrietta succumbed to drink and assorted pharmaceuticals, suffering more than a dozen breakdowns in the decades before her death. Throughout, the author ably illuminates the character of her great-aunt, who "took freedom as far as she could." Deeply researched, Bingham's engrossing biography brings her glamorous, tormented ancestor vividly to life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Henrietta Bingham was the daughter of a wealthy Louisville family. Her mother died when Henrietta was 12 and the girl became close to her father, a newspaper publisher with political connections. Mr. Bingham was appointed ambassador to England by Franklin Roosevelt. His personable daughter instead of his third wife served as hostess in London. Henrietta, on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, was acquainted with many public figures of the day. She had affairs with both men and women, judgment from family and friends about the latter leading to despair and addiction later in life. This meticulously researched story of Henrietta's life by her great-niece, Emily Bingham, draws on a trove of personal correspondence pieced together to tell of the life of a woman struggling to cope with her sexuality in a social world where she was a nonconformist. Impeccably read by actress Christina Delaine. VERDICT Though well executed, this biography will likely have limited appeal. Those interested in the history of acceptance of homosexuality and those with local connections to Louisville may enjoy. ["A fascinating glimpse into Southern LGBT history and another angle on the exploits of the Bloomsbury Group": LJ 4/15/15 review of the Farrar hc.]-Cheryl Youse, Moultrie, GA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: Herein Lieth Hid a Creature | p. 3 |
| Part 1 | |
| 1 Coquetting | p. 11 |
| 2 Pretty Boxes | p. 25 |
| 3 Detriment to Community | p. 46 |
| Part 2 | |
| 4 An American Girl of Twenty-One | p. 63 |
| 5 Free Associations | p. 77 |
| 6 O Let's Get Married | p. 92 |
| 7 Effects of Henrietta | p. 112 |
| 8 An'I Wish I Was Happy Again | p. 126 |
| 9 Jug Band Ordered | p. 146 |
| 10 A Red Damask Suite | p. 159 |
| Part 3 | |
| 11 Hunting | p. 181 |
| 12 Speed Six | p. 196 |
| 13 Miss America | p. 205 |
| 14 A Joyous and Satisfying Life | p. 223 |
| 15 Our House with Our Horses | p. 235 |
| 16 My Nerves Are Bad Tonight | p. 248 |
| 17 The Not At All Solved Problems of Henrietta | p. 267 |
| Postscript: Extant | p. 289 |
| Notes | p. 295 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 347 |
| Index | p. 349 |
