Reception
Mary Butts’ (1890-1937) was an English modernist novelist, short story writer and reviewer, highly regarded in her lifetime. She published in journals such as The Little Review and The Bookman and was admired for her work by luminaries such as T.S. Eliot and Bryher, as well as moving amongst the constellations of writers and patrons who define the way we perceive literary modernism today. After her death, the memory of her short stories and novels was eclipsed by the perception of Butts as a socialite. A renewal of interest in her work began in the 1980s with a conference and in the 1990s, the republication of many of her novels and stories.
A brief overview of Mary Butts' life and works
Mary Franeis Butts was born on December 13th, 1890, in Dorset, England, the daughter of Captain Frederick John Butts. The Captain resided in the magnificent ancestral estate of Salterns, in Parkstone, and his wife was Mary Jane Briggs, granddaughter of a successful jute merchant. Growing up in Salterns meant that Butts was surrounded by fine books and furniture, and most notably William Blake paintings that had been in the family since the time of Thomas Butts, her great-grandfather, and an important patron of Blake. As a child she lived an isolated rural life, one which taught her the value of loving nature, and in nature, to “see power”1. Butts felt intimate above all with her father, with whom she felt she shared a “secret knowledge” and who raised her on “cycles of antique story telling”2.
Butts’ father died when she was fourteen, leaving her ancestral home in the possession of her mother, who in Butts’ opinion “und[id] in less than half a lifetime the work of centuries”3 by selling beloved family heirlooms to cover his death-duties. Butts felt cheated of a cultural legacy through which she felt she could connect to her father’s spirit. In response to this her fiction frequently narrates the spiritual re-connection of female outsiders to land which is presented as their natural inheritance. For these reasons Butts has been described as an "expatriate from an imaginary England”4. Butts’ fiction tends to pit psychological dissolution and the invasion of the countryside against heroines who represent the possibility of spiritual renewal. Characters such as Van Ashe in Ashe of Rings or Scylla in Armed With Madness are depicted as the true inheritors of the countryside and its magic secrets. Through these secrets they offer the hope of a renewal of spiritual and rural values which Butts thought were under threat from the innovations of the modern age. Towards the end of the 1920s Butts' thinking became increasingly preoccupied by what she saw as threats to the countryside. In 1928 she begun Death of Felicity Taverner, a novel which centres around the conflict between an aristocratic English family and a Jewish Russian who wishes to buy up their land in order to bring in tourists. The novel exemplifies Butts racialised view of the world (for more on this see Patterson's account of its anti-Semitism5), but it is also her tribute to detective fiction, offering a brilliant synthesis of her modernist descriptions of land and seascapes with the plot-driven intrigue of that genre. The novel was begun in France, where Butts had lived amongst the international literary elite for most of the 1920s. But 1930 saw her moving to Sennen in the far west of Cornwall, a land she saw as removed from the worst excesses of materialist modernity. It was here that she came to reject the decadent lifestyle she had lived in France, rediscovered Christianity, and wrote her last work, the autobiography The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns. It was here that Butts died in 1937, as a result of her long term problems with narcotics.

For a thorough account of Mary Butts' life, see Nathalie Blondel's indispensable Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life.

1 Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood At Salterns. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1998, p11.
2 Ibid, p17, p11.
3 Ibid, p13.
4 Ian Patterson, ‘‘The Plan Behind the Plan": Russians, Jews and Mythologies of Change: The Case of Mary Butts", Bryan Cheyette, Laura Marcus (eds.), Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, p127.
5 Ibid.