Discover the captivating yet tragic story of Lady Henrietta Bingham, the Louisville newspaper heiress whose quest for authentic connection challenged the rigid boundaries of her time.
While F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the Jazz Age and Ernest Hemingway captured the Lost Generation, Henrietta lived it – saxophone in hand, heart wide open, and convention firmly in her rearview mirror.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Introduction
1:10 Chapter 1: Henrietta’s Hard Time in College
4:15 Chapter 2: The Artistic Side of London
7:19 Chapter 3: Restless Roots, Wild Orbits
10:24 Chapter 4: Henrietta’s Close Encounter With Marriage
13:42 Chapter 5: Beginning of the End
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Her journey from Smith College to Bloomsbury's artistic salons, from ambassadorial receptions to center court at Wimbledon, reveals the hidden currents beneath the seemingly placid surface of interwar high society.
Before setting foot in London's drawing rooms, Henrietta found herself floundering at Smith College—a place meant to shape young women into proper wives or polished thinkers.
While other girls focused on coursework and courtship, Henrietta fell—intensely and irreversibly—in love with her English professor.
Her fascination with jazz and late-night rebellion scandalized the administration, eventually leading to her expulsion, though she crafted a narrative of "studying abroad" to appease her powerful father.
Her confidante—and something more—was Martha Kirstein, a fellow Smith student who shared her sense of rebellion but who ultimately sought help from Ernest Jones, Freud's own disciple, regarding Henrietta's "homosexual tendency" which she feared was rooted in childhood trauma.
London in the 1920s throbbed with scandal and creativity, and Henrietta stepped into its embrace with fearless abandon, soon finding herself within the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group—the very circle that transformed modern ideas about art, literature, and unconventional love.
With a soft Southern drawl and a saxophone draped casually over her shoulder, she brought Harlem's swinging rhythms into London's art houses, her soulful blues breaking down barriers and speaking of freedom few could imagine.
At a countryside retreat, she encountered Dora Carrington—a reserved, enigmatic artist whose guarded exterior dissolved in the light of Henrietta's authenticity, leading to what Carrington later recalled as a brief, unburdened burst of passion that would forever alter her own view of intimacy.
Back in Kentucky, Henrietta walked like a ghost through the wide green land that had never felt like home, where people murmured about her preference for women.
She and her brother Barry opened a bookstore stocked with glittering volumes from London, a quiet act of rebellion tucked between familiar streets, yet her heart remained in London, sleepless and aching.
When her father finally discovered her relationship with Kirstein, everything shattered, and Henrietta ran back to London where she belonged among the wild ones—the writers, painters, and thinkers who turned rules inside out.
After a family trip to Scotland brought news of her father's remarriage, Henrietta and Kirstein returned to America, where their relationship began to split as Kirstein married a handsome, worldly man she once described as "a very male Henrietta."
Finding Kentucky even smaller than before, Henrietta headed to New York City, moving into an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment and working at Theatre Arts magazine, where she opened doors to new voices and made herself known in all the right corners.
She became briefly engaged to theater producer John Houseman, who claimed his heart had only ever fully belonged to Henrietta, but the romance cooled and the marriage never happened.
Loneliness settled in as her brother Barry unraveled, overwhelmed by grief and turning to alcohol until the bond between them broke apart and they barely recognized each other.
Increasingly dependent on prescription pills and alcohol despite friends' attempts to help, Henrietta's inner light gradually dimmed until drugs finally stopped her in her tracks.
At her funeral, people said it didn't feel quite right—as if she hadn't fully left or had never truly arrived, perhaps always running and possibly still running somewhere beyond their reach.
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