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  • Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham by Emily Bingham
  • Whitney Strub
Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham. By Emily Bingham. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Pp. 384. $28.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

From her birth in 1901 until her death in 1968, socialite Henrietta Bingham rode the tides of the twentieth century’s social changes: sordid Faulknerian tragedy in a wealthy Progressive Era Kentucky family; a stint as a Smith College flapper; Jazz Age decadence in New York City and with the Bloomsbury Group across England; participation in the development of psychoanalysis; and ultimately, a long, sad decline as her desires for women fell under the lens of Cold War era pathologization, driving her into alcoholism and despair. Irrepressible is a family story written from the inside—which turns out to be the only way it was possible to write. For author Emily Bingham, Henrietta was an eccentric great-aunt who passed away when Emily was three, little mentioned by surviving family until a passing reference from Emily’s grandmother describing Henrietta as an “invert” unintentionally spurred a years-long research project.

The resulting book chronicles the life of this wealthy, white, queer woman in as granular detail as is probably possible. Written for a popular audience, it rarely offers sustained or theoretical analysis of the fascinating stories it unearths. But as a feat of research, it impressively details the experiences of a woman whose racial and financial privilege failed to rescue her from not just marginalization but even deliberate historical erasure on account of her sexuality. As a recovery project, the book makes a valuable contribution to queer and lesbian history, both in the way that Bingham narrates a complicated life and, perhaps even more importantly, for the ways she carefully traces what aspects of that life remain elusive because lovers and family members alike set out to suppress them. Irrepressible proves a fitting title, describing not only Henrietta Bingham’s defining character trait but also the insistent demand that her biographer makes for her historical memory. [End Page 521]

In many ways Henrietta drifted through history. Oppressed as she was in a patriarchal, heterosexist world, she was also buoyed by her father’s nearly limitless wealth and in place of a career often simply traveled or pursued her interests. Aside from some forays into light social reporting from abroad for the family-owned Courier-Journal in Louisville, her tangible contributions remained sparse, but Bingham argues compellingly that Henrietta’s resilience itself was her greatest contribution. While she had several romantic and sexual relationships with men, women occupied the center of her intimate life, and while never “out” in a contemporary manner that would be anachronistic to expect during her lifetime, she also refused to hide her lovers, bravely living a publicly queer life to the fullest extent then possible.

The rhythm of Henrietta’s life imposes some repetitiveness on Irrepressible that Bingham can’t circumvent; there are simply diminishing returns to the reader as Henrietta embarks on her fourth or fifth aimless European tour. And while Bingham notes the problematic racial appropriation of a white southerner adopting black style and music to score social points in 1920s England, a broader analysis of whiteness as itself a shield from accusations of an often racialized midcentury “deviance” remains beyond the book’s purview. Bingham does interrogate fraught terrain, raising the possibility of incest in Henrietta’s codependent relationship with her father (the author’s great-grandfather); Bingham concludes that it was unlikely but leaves the possibility open.

Bingham shows how Henrietta’s psychoanalysis at the hands of the unscrupulous Ernest Jones became fodder for his developing theory of lesbian neurosis. While some scholars of this material may find the psychoanalytical exegesis, framed as it is for a wider public, a bit thin, Bingham nonetheless makes a noteworthy contribution to the social history of psychology in her meticulous contrast of the lives of the “veritable lesbian laboratory” Henrietta and her friends constituted against Jones’s published version, which erroneously claimed to have “brought her from women to men” (97, 192).

Among Henrietta’s more noteworthy affairs were those with the...

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