“Nobody’s Bizness if I Do”: Henrietta Bingham: Jazz Hound, Bloomsbury Muse, and Queer Culture Vixen
Channel: Brooklyn Museum
Date: 2016-01-29

Henrietta Bingham was in the cultural vanguard as a muse to the Bloomsbury group, the daughter of the ambassador to England during the rise of Nazism, a seducer of royalty and athletic champions, and a pre-Stonewall figure who never buckled to convention. Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families in the American South, she was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead, she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character: intoxicating and intoxicated, seductive and brilliant, and often deeply troubled. The speed and pleasure of her youth in New York, Louisville, and London was followed by years of addiction and breakdowns. But her grandniece, biographer and historian Emily Bingham, knew none of that part growing up. Uncovering the secret of who her great-aunt was, and why her story was buried for so long, led Emily Bingham to write Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham (2015).

Join Emily Bingham for a presentation about her book and a conversation about this extraordinary woman.

This event took place at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on January 24, 2016. Video courtesy Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation.

www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/video/