Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham
by Emily Bingham ’83
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2015
Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families of 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 Louisville, New York 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 decades, the toxicity of judgment from others, coupled with her own anxieties, resulted in years of addiction and breakdowns. Perhaps most painfully, she became a source of embarrassment for her family. For biographer and historian Emily Bingham, the secret of her great-aunt, and why her story was concealed for so long, led to Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham.
Emily Bingham is the great-niece of Henrietta Bingham. She is the author of Mordecai: An Early American Family and co-editor of The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After “I’ll Take My Stand.” She holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and teaches at Centre College.