A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade 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 prot g e 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.
Customer Review: a summer reading jewel
Hummingbirds! I would have never thought of them as some kind of ambiguous stand-in for a number of concerns of the period (marital infidelity or bliss, abolitionist arguments of freedom, a hint of tea totaling or the pleasures of a sumptuous life) but I’m sure I’ll see them everywhere now.
Benfey provides you with a paragraph or so of Twain, a few stanzas of Dickinson, a painting of Heade and then composes fascinating readings, sensitive of them by combining close analysis and historical detail. His pleasure and enjoyment of these authors and artists is palpable and contagious.
I really appreciate the way this book resists the common urge to treat Dickinson’s biography as freakish (the white dresses, the recklessness, etc.). Benfey calls her a “stay-at-home visionary” and points out that “by April 1882, Dickinson could have published a volume of her poems had she wished to do so.”
One of my favorite aspects of this book is the way it makes moments of the nineteenth century seem so close to our own experience. Benfey ends a description of the “hotel-world” that Henry Flagler creates: “Guests arrived at the resort in luxury railroad cars designed by Flagler, bearing the same yellow trim–`Flagler Yellow’–as the arches and windows of the hotel. The transition between railroad and hotel was seamless…” Doesn’t that just sound like the branded, constructed trip one would get from, say Disney?
Customer Review: Pedestrian
The overall symbol of the hummingbird to describe how America was changing from a staid worldview to a more transient, evanescent one in the Civil and post Civil War period is probably insightful. The author also gives us some biographical details not well known about well known luminaries (and people who would become luminaries) of that period. HOWEVER, his writing is pedestrian and I found the book quite a slog. I’m a huge fan of Emily Dickinson(who knew?) and an admirer of Mark Twain, et al. So, I persevered; but I kept thinking about how dull this English professor’s classes must be, despite the interesting subject matter.
I don’t think this book would capture/retain the interest of the general reader.
Tags: Photography book, Arts book, Arts and Photography book, Art photography book, Cheap Photography book, Cheap Arts book
