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opinion that he is a first-class failure.”
    Though A Summer of Hummingbirds thrums with the interlocking tales of these idiosyncratic individuals, with inspired vignettes and gossipy asides, and the author’s prevailing Olympian perspective, in a manner to suggest Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2002), at the core of the story Benfey finds so intriguing is an impassioned portrait of Emily Dickinson—what might be called Dickinson’s most inward and erotic self, of which Benfey has written in such earlier essays as “The Mystery of Emily Dickinson” (in American Audacity ), and here attaches to the “route of evanescence” that finds its ideal expression in the hummingbird. It isn’t just that Dickinson is the most original and provocative of the individuals in Benfey’s book but she remains the most enigmatic, a perennial goad to critical speculation: despite the enormous attention she has received, Dickinson “remains almost as mysterious as Shakespeare…She is part of our language without being part of our history” ( Emily Dickinson: Lives of a Poet ). As Brenda Wineapple concedes with disarming candor at the midway point in her wonderfully evocative double portrait of Dickinson and Dickinson’s friend/editor/“Master” Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, White Heat :
    Emily Dickinson stops my narrative. For as the woman in white, savante and reclusive, shorn of context, place, and reference, she seems to exist outside of time, untouched by it. And that’s unnerving. No wonder we make up stories about her, about her lovers, if any, or how many or why she turned her back on ordinary life and when she knew the enormity of her own gift (of course she knew) and how she combined words in ways we never imagined and wish we could.
    As Benfey’s subtitle suggests, for all its shimmering web of interlocking ideas, the “scandal” of Eros is the driving force here, culminating in two seemingly ecstatic adulterous relationships—the affair of the most famous Protestant preacher of his era, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, and one of his female admirers, Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton—“The biggest sex scandal in the history of American religion,” as Benfey breathlessly notes—which resulted in a highly publicized adultery trial in 1874; and the remarkably protracted affair of Emily Dickinson’s brother Austin and the much younger Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor. While Emily Dickinson’s connection with the dashing Reverend Beecher was slight, Dickinson was well aware of her brother’s longtime affair with Mrs. Todd and seems to have been, with her sister Vinnie, in some way a confidante of the illicit lovers who used the Homestead, the Dickinson family house, for their trysts. And there were Emily Dickinson’s shadow-lovers, among them the “Master” to whom Dickinson alludes tantalizingly in numerous poems, and the Massachusetts Supreme Court justice Otis Lord, Dickinson’s elder by eighteen years and a “crusty conservative” who emerges in Dickinson’s life after the death of Dickinson’s father, as a source of solace and affection, even as possible fiancé. 1 Unhappily for Dickinson, the one man who seems to have unequivocally loved her and may have wished to marry her died of a stroke in 1884, before anything like a formal engagement was announced. Broken in spirit by this loss, as by numerous others including the terrible typhoid death of a beloved littlenephew, Dickinson herself grew ill and died in 1886, at the age of fifty-five.
    Benfey locates in the poetry of Dickinson’s younger years an obsession with Lord Byron—Byron’s famous poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” becomes “the Rosetta stone of (Dickinson’s) tortured destiny”—and a frankly sexual undertone to