Irrepressible

April 6, 2015
In lovely prose, historian Bingham (Mordecai: An Early American Family) draws readers behind the veil of silence surrounding her great-aunt Henrietta, who was part of a wealthy, politically influential Kentucky family. Henrietta was very young when her mother died, and navigated a difficult, nearly incestuous relationship with her narcissistic father. She met her first love, the composition professor Mina Kerstein, at Smith College in the early 1920s. They subsequently spent time in England, where Mina, intellectually intrigued by their mutual sexual desires, arranged for their psychoanalysis with a Freudian doctor. Bingham is at her best when describing Henrietta’s conflicted feelings about her sexuality as she drifted into acquaintance with the Bloomsbury literary crowd and had affairs with both men and women, including artist Dora Carrington and future producer/actor John Houseman. But Henrietta comes across as less interesting than the company she kept, a minor character overshadowed by the much larger personalities and events of the 20th century. Though the story is weighed down by the minutiae of Henrietta’s life and fails to offer much insight on her era, it succeeds as a psychological study of an unusual woman. Illus.