A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade Book

When I finished this book the word delicate came to mind, suited to a work in which hummingbirds play so big a part. It's a pleasure to read criticism as delicate as this and as magical as a hummingbird's flight. Benfey describes an age of American art and letters and society and history focusing on the lives and work of Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Johnson Heade, and Emily Dickinson as well as various lives around them. He finds what they all have in common and shows how those enthusiasms link them and help create the art we associate with the period following the Civil War. Benfey uses the theme of hummingbirds, appropriate to all his subjects, to flit from person to person connecting them in the darting thrust of his text and ideas. But not only hummingbirds stitch them together--they share other confluences of circumstance, such as Brazil, transits of Venus, northeastern Florida, and flowers like the trailing arbutus. The picture Benfey is able to give us of the period and his subjects by using all these associations is colorful and elaborate. If the book has a main focus it's Dickinson. She's the flower here and the others along with their family and acquaintances are the hummingbirds who hover and feed on or near her presence in our literary history. I think the book is ambitious, clever criticism.