Henrietta Bingham

Henrietta had two brothers: Robert Worth Bingham (1897–1965) and George Barry Bingham (1906–1988).

As a child she was strong, competitive and good at many sports, particularly tennis.

When she was twelve, Henrietta's mother was killed in a road accident at a level crossing.

Henrietta and Barry, her younger brother, were present in the car at the time, and the whole family was traumatized.

Henrietta Bingham was attractive and charismatic, and as she passed through her adolescence, she took advantage of this, flirting with boys, and noticeably to many people, her father.

She became her father's favorite over her brothers and he petted and spoiled her.

Henrietta Bingham (January 3, 1901 – June 17, 1968) was a wealthy American journalist, newspaper executive and horse breeder.

When she was twelve, she was present when her mother was killed in a road accident which traumatized the whole family.

She subsequently developed a very close relationship with her father who took a long time to recognize her lesbianism although eventually he became reconciled to her sexuality.

Henrietta Worth Bingham was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 3, 1901, to Robert Worth Bingham (1871–1937), a lawyer who was an aspiring politician, and Eleanor "Babes" Miller (1870–1913) who had married in 1896.

Her father's family had become prosperous in textiles and her mother came from a family that had become very wealthy in the engineering industry.

In 1911 he had been appointed as a judge on the circuit court and in 1918 with the money he inherited, the Judge (as he came to be called always) purchased two Louisville newspapers – the Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times.

Henrietta developed a love of jazz and took up playing the saxophone – the Judge tolerated this against the mores of their society.

In 1916, her father married Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, reputed to be "the wealthiest woman in the United States", having inherited $100 million when her elderly first husband Henry Flagler died.

After less than one year of marriage on July 27, 1917, Mary Lily died, aged fifty.

It was kept secret that she had died through alcohol and morphine addiction.

When her will was contested, the court case revealed that she and her stepchildren had got on extremely badly, and the newspapers encouraged the suspicion that Henrietta and her brothers were somehow to do with her death, and that their father might be a murderer.

In the 1920s she became an anglophile flapper and she associated with the Bloomsbury Group.

She did well at school and in 1920 she became the first member of her family to enter an elite university: Smith College.

At Smith, the women's liberal arts college, new entrants were required to pass further exams to be allowed to continue into the next calendar year.

Henrietta struggled and was persuaded to try again for re-entry in 1921.

She formed a friendship with her English composition instructor, Mina Kirstein (sister of Lincoln Kirstein) and they became so close as to declare their love for each other.

When her readmission had been confirmed Henrietta, with her father and younger brother, went on their annual visit to Britain at the same time as Kirstein who was visiting Harold Laski and his wife.

With Kirstein, the Binghams mingled with modernist society in Britain.

When Henrietta restarted her freshman year at Smith she again got into difficulty, not only academically but also by not keeping to the college's regulations.

In 1922, now a full-fledged flapper with cropped hair and a poor reputation, she was asked to leave the college.

To hide from her father that she could not continue her education, Bingham pretended that the college was allowing her time away to study in Europe and Kirstein contrived to be granted study leave in Europe at the same time.

The Bingham family travelled to England separately from Kirstein but, when it was time for the rest of the Binghams to return home, Henrietta persuaded her father to let her stay on with Kirstein as chaperone.

The two women, besotted with each other, set off on a grand tour of continental Europe.

Kirstein did not see a future for them as fully sexual lovers and from Carcassonne she wrote a twelve-page letter to Ernest Jones – the leading Freudian psychoanalyst in Britain at a time when psychoanalysis was generally regarded as dangerously aberrant.

Her letter asked for help for an attractive 21-year-old American woman with irrational fears and a "homosexual tendency" possibly due to her childhood experiences.

Bingham, she wrote, had developed an attraction towards Kirstein herself.

She said that neither of them was ashamed of their relationship but they wanted to move on to another stage in their lives – "I am not a homosexual, though I love her very much".

Bingham reluctantly agreed to psychoanalysis in London and refused to return to America even when her father asked for her urgently.

When the Judge traveled to England at the end of 1922 he visited Jones and was satisfied that Henrietta's anxiety was being treated properly.

Kirstein and Bingham enjoyed the bohemian nightlife in London and through David Garnett they made contact with the Bloomsbury Group.

To allow them to stay in Britain Garnett suggested the couple might rent Tidmarsh Mill, the home of Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington and her then husband Ralph Partridge, while the owners were going to be away for the summer.

When they arrived to view the property Carrington found Kirstein lovely, with a perfect slim figure, and Bingham was "my style, pink with a round face, dressed in mannish clothes, with a good natural style".

In 1935 she purchased and ran a Kentucky estate for breeding thoroughbred racehorses.

Her 1954 marriage, after a succession of partners, men and women, was unsuccessful.