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

by Christopher Benfey
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

by Christopher Benfey

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

The country's most noted writers, poets, and artists converge at a singular moment in American life, a great companion to fans of the film A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson. 

At 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780143115083
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 03/31/2009
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Christopher Benfey is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and the author of the award-winning book A Summer of Hummingbirds. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents


Dramatis Personae     xiii
Prologue: A Place in the Sky Where a Cloud Has Been     1
An Oblique War
A Tea Rose     13
The Prodigal     39
Beecher's Pockets     63
Tristes Tropiques     81
At the Hotel Byron
The Prisoner of Chillon     107
Birds of Passage     133
Covert Flowers, Hidden Nests     159
Transits of Venus
Foggy Bottom     179
A Route of Evanescence     195
Florida     221
Epilogue: Toward the Blue Peninsula     243
Acknowledgments     261
Notes     263
Index     279
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