Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham

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Description

Raised like a princess in one of the crucial powerful families in the American South, Henrietta Bingham was once 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 steadily terribly troubled. In New York, Louisville, and London, she drove both women and men 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 take a look at to cure her queerness. After the speed and pleasure of her early decades, 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 once labeled “a three-dollar bill.” But forebears can turn into fairy-tale figures, especially when they defy tradition and are spoken of only in whispers. For the biographer and historian Emily Bingham, the name of the game of who her great-aunt was once, and just why her story was once 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 UK right through the upward push 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 that lie buried in our own families.

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