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Emily Bingham

Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham Hardcover – June 16, 2015

by Emily Bingham (Author)

4.0 130 ratings

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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.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

June 16, 2015
Dimensions

6.06 x 1.24 x 9.27 inches
ISBN-10

0809094649
ISBN-13

978-0809094646
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Editorial Reviews

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“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 . . . You can read Irrepressible strictly for plot because [Emily] Bingham . . . propels us along at the exhilirating 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, The New York Times Book Review

“Henrietta Bingham, the great-aunt of the author of this haunting biography, is best remembered for her association with the Bloomsbury group . . . Bingham captures both the giddy rebellion of her aunt's youth and her slow, startling unravelling.” ―The New Yorker

"Henrietta Bingham was one of those entrancing creatures more often met in books than in life . . . Emily Bingham’s painstaking reconstruction of Henrietta’s story shows that she was a pioneer of sorts―a poignant case of a life unspooled before the world was ready for her odd grace." ―Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal

"In this sensitive and emotionally rich biography . . . [Henrietta Bingham] flashes unforgettably back into life." ―Joanna Scutts, The Washington Post

“The life of Henrietta Bingham, as recounted by her great-niece Emily in Irrepressible, is so engrossing that readers will finish the book astonished at not having heard of her before . . . Emily Bingham has given us a faithful unretouched portrait of a bewitching, courageous, sometimes maddening woman . . . My advice is don't wait for the movie--get a copy of this engaging book and read it now.” ―Jennie Rathbun, Lambda Literary

“Irrepressible is the absorbing, deeply moving, and brilliantly researched story of an intoxicating woman whose personal life was as turbulent as the times she lived in: Henrietta Bingham dazzles the reader as she dazzled the artists, writers, and musicians around her in the Jazz Age and beyond.” ―Frances Osborne, author of The Bolter

“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 . . . . 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. ” ―Kirkus Reviews

“Deeply researched and written with passion, this is the story of a tantalizing and unconventional woman in her elusive search for happiness. Irrepressible lives up to its dramatic title.” ―Michael Holroyd, author of A Book of Secrets

“With Irrepressible, Emily Bingham has forensically crafted a riveting story of the American South, as her great aunt's taboo-shattering sexual odyssey spirals out of control. The mesmerizing It Girl crashes headlong into Jazz Age Bloomsbury; the result is a literary masterpiece of ground-breaking social history.” ―Geordie Greig, author of Breakfast with Lucian

“Emily Bingham's lively and intimate life of Henrietta Bingham sheds surprising light on one Jazz Age woman's transatlantic adventures. Irrepressible gives us a hard-drinking, Harlem-loving temptress who captivated women and men alike, in both England and the United States, leaving the ground littered with their broken hearts. But it's also the story of a woman torn between her love for her controlling father and the desire to live life on her own terms.” ―Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, author of Mr. and Mrs. Prince

“In crisp, graceful prose, Bingham trails her great-aunt from an athletic youth shadowed by her mother's death and father's marriages through her years as a magical presence and muse to her middle-age descent into breakdowns and addiction . . . With meticulous research and compassion, her great-niece has put some of those pieces together and Henrietta back in the Bingham family album.” ―Jane Sumner, The Dallas Morning News

About the Author

Emily Bingham is the great-niece of Henrietta Bingham. She is the author of Mordecai: An Early American Family and the coeditor of The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After "I'll Take My Stand." She earned a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and frequently teaches at Centre College. She lives with her family in Louisville, Kentucky.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (June 16, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0809094649
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0809094646
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.06 x 1.24 x 9.27 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,971,102 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,540 in LGBTQ+ Biographies (Books)
- #8,518 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #19,838 in Women's Biographies

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4.0 130 ratings

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Emily Bingham

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Born in Louisville, Kentucky into a journalism family, Emily early on decided she wanted to write. Among her grade-school efforts was a poem inspired by the typewriter her father gave her as a child, and on which he typed bedtime stories as he told them. Her poem, “Typewriter,” weighed the options—poet, novelist, journalist. The opportunity to dig deep into the past to tell true stories that shine a light on how we got here came later when she caught the bug for archival research and enrolled in Chapel Hill’s US history doctoral program.

Emily is currently Visiting Honors Faculty Fellow at Bellarmine University. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in Vogue, Ohio Valley History, The Journal of Southern History, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and New England Review. Her books are My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song (2022), Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham (2015), Mordecai: An Early American Family (2003), and, as editor with Thomas A. Underwood, The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After I’ll Take My Stand (2001). She and her husband have three children.

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gammyjill

Interesting life...

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2015

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Emily Bingham's biography of her great-aunt, "Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham" is a very well written book. Emily and Henrietta are members of the Bingham dynasty of Louisville, who, during the 20th century, produced some illustrious newspaper publishers, writers, and diplomats. The family also had some seriously emotionally troubled members, of whom one was Henrietta Bingham. She was a bi-sexual - leaning more to the gay side - in a time when gays were not particularly welcomed by society. She was also a wealthy young woman, very pretty, who lived her life as openly as it could be at the time.

I came away with the feeling that Henrietta Bingham was one of those people who a Venn-diagram would place in the middle of circles that came together around her. She didn't produce any works of art or literature, but inspired those who did. She was part of the Bloomsbury group in London in the early 1920's and also went through analysis with Dr Ernest Jones, the biographer of Freud, and a leading psychoanalyst. The process went on for years - with Henrietta coming and going from London quite regularly. She had many lovers of both genders; the most famous were John Houseman and Helen Hull Jacobs. She was an expert horsewoman and a breeder of race and hunting horses. But who was she, really?

Henrietta lost her mother in an auto accident when Henrietta was 14 years old. Henrietta was in the accident and witnessed her mother's death. She had an odd relationship with her father, Robert Worth Bingham; they were yin and yang. They went through emotional boxing sessions that ended with her father's death in 1937. She seemed to "know" everybody there was to know in the 1920's and 1930's and her time in London in the mid-1930's as the daughter of the US Ambassador to the Court of St James, reminded me a bit about Martha Dodd and her time in Berlin as the daughter of William Dodd, our ambassador to Germany around the same time. Henrietta died of drink in her mid-50's.

But for all her activities in Louisville, London, and New York, what exactly did Henrietta Bingham do to deserve such a well-written biography? It seems that the family disapproval of her and her life style interested her great-niece, Emily. Emily seems to want to see Henrietta both within the context of her family and in the wider world. I'm just not sure the subject warranted the biography.

(This Emily Bingham is also the author of "Mordecai: An Early American Family", superb look at a Jewish family in Virginia in the 1700 and 1800's. She is not the author of the erotic literature listed on Amazon. At least, I don't think she is!)

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

An interesting but ultimately sad life

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2015

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Interesting look at the life of a woman of means who consorted with many of the bold name figures of the 20's and 30's. Bingham obviously was a very troubled woman. She was a lesbian at a time when it was nearly impossible to live openly in most circles. However, Henrietta Bingham did have the advantage of wealth and the ability to move in circles in which being homosexual was not forbidden or hidden. It was an atmosphere in which she could have made a life for her self with the woman/women she loved but something prevented her from committing to any one -- male or female lovers. Although her homosexuality was certainly the cause of some of her emotional issues, frankly, I thought that the thing in her life that caused the greatest turmoil for her was the fact of having her mother killed in her presence in a horrific train/car accident and subsequently seeing her father marry Mary Lily Flagler and then having her die under questionable circumstances which dogged the father for the rest of his life. It also was obvious that Robert Worth Bingham, her father, had a suffocating attachment to her and she to him -- and she spent her life trying to "escape" that attachment but never successfully made the break that she so desperately needed to make.
Ultimately it's a sad story and a sad life. I kept waiting for Henrietta to drop the façade and live with the woman she loved but -- she didn't and instead allowed herself to drift into drinking and drugs and basically wasted her life having accomplished nothing of importance. Her father was suffocating but he also provided her with the money to live well and he was also willing to give her the opportunity to takeover and run the newspaper that he owned. That kind of thinking on his part for his only daughter was far outside the mold of men in the 1930's. Yet, she rejected the opportunity to manage the papers which just may have given her a purpose in life beyond being "fascinating" to both men and women.

6 people found this helpful

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Jendi Reiter

Important addition to queer history, though flawed by incest-denial myths

Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2016

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A livelier read than most bios, this book rehabilitates a "black sheep" ancestor whose story was suppressed because of her bisexual, bohemian lifestyle. I respect the amount of work that it took to re-create Henrietta's life when many of her letters and papers were destroyed due to fear of anti-gay prejudice. Our queer history is important to recover. Though not an artist herself, young Henrietta was a bewitching character at the center of artistic social circles in the US and England, including the famed Bloomsbury Group. Through her, readers meet notable figures like Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey, Mina and Lincoln Kirstein, African-American blues singer Edith Wilson, and even Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.

However, the author's framing of Henrietta's traumatic bond with her father repeats discredited and dangerous Freudian myths about "seductive" children and incest fantasies. Bingham concedes that Henrietta's father was at the very least a perpetrator of emotional incest, but resorts to ridiculous arguments about why nothing physical could have happened (e.g. he was too respectable and civic-minded??). Regardless of what actually happened to Henrietta, this flawed logic makes it harder for all survivors to be believed. Given that a major theme of the book is psychoanalytic malpractice toward gays and lesbians, I'm surprised that Bingham gives Freudian incest-denial such credence when it comes to Henrietta's memories of abuse.

I was tempted to give the book only 3 stars because of the above issue, but I think it is overall a valuable resource for material that a more feminist writer could have handled better. Let's hope this is not the last word on Henrietta Bingham.

2 people found this helpful

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David Dunbar

The Troubled Life of a Jazz Age Rich Kid

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2021

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Henrietta Bingham was a member of the wealthy and influential Bingham family of Louisville, Kentuck.
I came across her in a book about the family called House of Dreams and was fascinated by her - a mix of incredibly powerful seductiveness and massive insecurities.
The author, a relative of Henrietta's, was likewise fascinated and wrote this book about her.
It's excellent. Well-written, well-researched, clear-eyed and probing. By the end of the book, I was a little in love with this troubled woman myself.
It would also appeal to anyone interested in the artistic world of England in the 1920s and 1930s, where H spent a lot of her time.

One person found this helpful

Future Trend Spotter

Excellent.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 6, 2017

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Compelling story of a woman ahead of her time struggling to find her own place in a world that did not accept her as she was. Loved it.

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