A Summer of Hummingbirds
A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade Christopher Benfey,
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN: 1594201609
DDC: 811.4
Edition: Hardcover; 2008-04-17
Summary:
A surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within a
group of exceptional and uniquely talented characters shaped and
changed American thought At the close of the Civil War, the United
States took a deep breath to lick wounds and consider the damage
done. A Summer of Hummingbirds reveals how, at that tender moment,
the lives of some of our most noted writers, poets, and
artists-including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
and Martin Johnson Heade-intersected to make sense of it all.
Renowned critic Christopher Benfey maps the intricate web of
friendship, family, and romance that connects these larger than life
personalities to one another, and in doing so discovers a unique
moment in the development of American character. In this meticulously
researched and creatively imagined work, Benfey takes the seemingly
arbitrary image of the hummingbird and traces its "route of
evanescence" as it travels in circles to and from the creative
wellsprings of the age: from the naturalist writings of abolitionist
Thomas Wentworth Higginson to the poems of his wayward pupil Emily
Dickinson; into the mind of Henry Ward Beecher and within the
writings and paintings of his famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. A
Summer of Hummingbirds unveils how, through the art of these great
thinkers, the hummingbird became the symbol of an era, an image
through which they could explore their controversial (and often
contradictory) ideas of nature, religion, sexuality, family, time,
exoticism, and beauty. Benfey's complex tale of interconnection comes
to an apex in Amherst, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1882, a
time when loyalties were betrayed and thoughts exchanged with the
speed of a hummingbird's wings. Here in the wake of the very public
Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton sex scandal, Mabel Loomis
Todd-the young and beautiful protŽgŽe to the hummingbird painter
Martin Johnson Heade-begins an affair with Austin Dickinson and
leaves her mentor heartbroken; Emily Dickinson is found in the arms
of her father's friend Judge Otis Lord, and that's not all. As
infidelity and lust run rampant, the incendiary ghost of Lord Byron
is evoked, and the characters of A Summer of Hummingbirds find
themselves caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of
decorum, restraint, and judgment and a romantic, unconventional world
in which nature prevails and freedom is all.
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