Mary Butts

divdivBritish modernist writer Mary Butts (1890–1937), now recognized as one of the most important and original authors of the interwar years, lived an unconventional life. She encountered many of the most famous figures in early twentieth-century literature, music, and art—among them T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein—and came to know some of them intimately. These luminaries figure prominently in journals in which Butts chronicled the development of her craft between 1916 and her untimely death in 1937. This volume is the first substantial edition of her journals. Introduced and annotated by Nathalie Blondel, the leading authority on Butts’s life and works, the book reveals the workings of a complex and distinctive mind while offering vivid insights into her fascinating era. /DIV/DIV

A scholarly and experimental collection that offers fresh insight-with a feminist focus-into the often overlooked modernist writer Mary Butts and the contested processes of recovering such an author. Scholars instrumental in the recovery of Mary Butts, along with newer writers, publishers, printers, and artists, enter into conversation exploring the work of the British author, whose body of work plays between high modernist forms and more popular genres-writing that can be described as occult, Gothic, queer, proto-environmental, and feminist. Taking its cue from Butts's experimental, rhythmic writing and the transnational artistic communities in which Butts moved in the 1920s, the collection is a non-linear exchange rather than a collection of isolated arguments-a conversation constructed from "classical" academic chapters, "knight's move" non-academic reflections, and short responses to these. This conversation lies at the intersection of "feminism" and "reconstruction": Chapters range between Butts's writing techniques and forms, her position in the modernist canon, contested sites of feminism in her work, critical reception of that work, queer and post-critical readings, and the success of, and the need for, a feminist recovery of the author. The collection aims to be a feminist engagement, while asking questions of what this might look like, why it is needed, and how such an approach offers fresh insight into an erudite, playful, difficult, contradictory, and experimental body of work. Ultimately, the collection asks, how should we reconstruct the author and her work for the contemporary reader?

A psychosexual quest for spiritual transformation leads to madness and death on the Cornish countryside in this 1928 “masterpiece of modern prose” (London Review of Books). To escape the devastation of World War I, a group of young bohemians decamp to the remote southwestern coast of England. Among the close-knit circle are Scylla Taverner, her brother Felix, and her soon-to-be lover Picus, all of whom are determined to forge a new morality free of the repressive forces that nearly destroyed civilization. When the group discovers an ancient chalice that may be the Holy Grail, they become obsessed with unleashing its spiritual power. But their quest leads them down a terrifying path of exhilarating possibility and violent consequence.

Short stories embodying the Lost Generation during the '20s and '30s and featuring the power of hidden things and things of hidden power.

By reading the work of the British modernists - Dorothy Richardson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf - through the lens of material culture, this text argues that women's imaginative work is inseparable from their ambivalent, complicated relation to Britain's imperial history.

A distinctive and original voice within the Modernist movement, the English novelist Mary Butts was a prodigy of style, learning and energy, whose work compared with Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot, and was championed by Pound, Robert McAlmon, Ford Madox Ford, and others.