A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher BenfeyThe Penguin Press, 2008

The subtitle of this book—”Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade”—is more gossipy-seeming than the book itself is (though I think its gossipy bits, about Mabel Loomis Todd’s affair with Austin Dickinson, and Henry Ward Beecher’s possible affair with Elizabeth Tilton, are some of the best parts). Benfey writes both about specific people and their (sometimes loosely) intersecting lives, and about the broader culture: he argues that after the Civil War, there was a shift, at least among intellectuals, away from an earlier New England Puritanism and toward a conception of greater freedom in life (and in love). He writes about art and artists, about writers, about Martin Johnson Heade’s trips to the tropics and to Florida, and his hummingbird and orchid paintings, and about Dickinson’s hummingbird poem, and Stowe’s pet hummingbird, arguing that the general fascination with the hummingbird’s darting color and exquisite shape and “route of evanescence” (the phrase is Dickinson’s) has something to say about the changing route of society itself. It’s a pleasing book, though I sometimes found myself annoyed by the shifts in time and place, by things like the repetition of the same quote about the Newburyport salt marshes that inspired Heade, once on page 88 and then again on page 213. Mostly, though, it’s interesting, and I liked Benfey’s playful and intelligent narrative.