A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
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The country's most noted writers, poets, and artists converge at a singular moment in American lifeAt the close of the Civil War, the lives of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade intersected in an intricate map of friendship, family, and romance that marked a milestone in the development of American art and literature. Using the image of a flitting hummingbird as a metaphor for the gossamer strands that connect these larger-than-life personalities, Christopher Benfey re-creates the summer of 1882, the summer when Mabel Louise Todd-the protégé to the painter Heade-confesses her love for Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, and the players suddenly find themselves caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of decorum, restraint, and judgment and a new, unconventional world in which nature prevails and freedom is all.The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn the summer of 1864, novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe brought an injured hummingbird into her house. She fortified its spirits with sugar water, provided a little bed, and mandated convalescent naps; in a short time she had it perching at her side to take its meals from a tiny spoon. A male hummingbird with his hunger and his aggression is a comical image of human masculinity; with his injuries and his blood-red throat, this one may also have been a stand-in for Harriet's son Fred, wounded grievously at Gettysburg the year before, a son of temperance activists who would seek solace in the bottle for the rest of his life, until he disappeared without a trace in far-off San Francisco.
Dramatis PersonaePrologue: A Place in the Sky Where a Cloud Has Been 1Pt. 1 An Oblique WarCh. 1 A Tea Rose 13Ch. 2 The Prodigal 39Ch. 3 Beecher's Pockets 63Ch. 4 Tristes Tropiques 81Pt. 2 At the Hotel ByronCh. 5 The Prisoner of Chillon 107Ch. 6 Birds of Passage 133Ch. 7 : Covert Flowers, Hidden Nests 159Pt. 3 Transits of VenusCh. 8 Foggy Bottom 179Ch. 9 A Route of Evanescence 195Ch. 10 Florida 221Epilogue: Toward the Blue Peninsula 243Acknowledgments 261Notes 263Index 279
