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Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
Penguin Press
April 2008
On Sale: April 17, 2008
304 pages
ISBN: 1594201609
EAN: 9781594201608
Hardcover
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Fiction
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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