If you've not
read Mary Butts, then her short story collections
(From
Altar to Chimney-Piece, With and Without Buttons and Other
Stories) are a good place
to start; here her work is at its most accessible and
dynamic. Armed with
Madness is perhaps her
most widely read novel and best represents her modernist
experimentation. This bibliography gives an overview of
Butts' published works and critical studies about her.
Nathalie Blondel's Mary Butts:
Scenes from the Life gives a
definitive bibliography that includes Butts' prolific
writing for the magazines and journals of her day, and the
appearances that she makes in the writing of her
contemporaries.
Published works
by Mary Butts
‘Magic’, The Little
Review,
vol. 7, no. 2, July-August 1920.
‘Change’,
The
Dial,
vol. 72, no. 5, May 1922.
Speed the Plough and Other Stories, London: Chapman and Hall
1923.
The Crystal Cabinet: My
Childhood at Salterns, Boston: Beacon Press,
1988.
Nathalie
Blondel (ed.), With and Without Buttons
and Other Stories, Manchester: Carcanet Press
1991.
From Altar to Chimney-Piece: Selected
Stories, New York: McPherson & Co,
1992.
The Taverner Novels: Armed With Madness, Death of Felicity
Taverner, New York: McPherson & Co,
1992.
The Classical Novels: The Macedonian, Scenes from the Life
of Cleopatra, New York: McPherson & Co,
1994.
Ashe of Rings, New York: McPherson & Co,
1998.
Camilla
Bagg and Nathalie Blondel (eds.), 'Bloomsbury',
modernism/modernity,
vol. 5, no.2, (1998), pp35-45.
‘Ghosties and
Ghoulies’, Ashe of
Rings,
New York: McPherson & Co, 1998. First serialised
in The
Bookman, vol. 83 no. 469 (Jan.
1933), pp386-389;
vol. 83 no. 497 (Feb. 1933), pp433-435; vol. 83, no. 498
(Mar. 1933), pp493-494; vol. 84, no. 499 (Apr. 1933),
pp12-14.
‘Imaginary Letters’, Ashe of
Rings,
New York: McPherson & Co, 1998.
‘Traps
for Unbelievers’, Ashe of
Rings,
New York: McPherson & Co, 1998.
‘Warning
to Hikers’, Ashe of
Rings,
New York: McPherson & Co, 1998.
Armed with Madness, London: Penguin,
2001.
Nathalie
Blondel (ed.), The Journals of Mary
Butts,
London: Yale University Press, 2002.
Views of Butts'
Contemporaries
Baker, Frank I Follow But
Myself,
London: Peter Davies, 1968.
Bowen, Stella, Drawn From
Life: Reminiscences by Stella
Bowen,
London: Collins, 1941.
McAlmon, Robert, Kay Boyle
(revision and supplementary chapters), Being Geniuses Together
1920-1930, Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984.
Wagstaff, Christopher
(ed.), A
sacred quest: the life and writings of Mary
Butts,
New York: McPherson & Co., 1995.
Select critical
works on Mary Butts
Blondel, Nathalie, Mary Butts: Scenes from the
Life,
New York: McPherson & Co, 1998.
---, Two
kinds of non-realist Modernist Space: a comparative reading
of the 'deep-space' and 'layered space' works of Mary Butts
(1890-1937) and Jane Bowles
(1917-1973), University of Liverppol
Ph.D., 1989.
Buchanan, Bradley W., 'Armed with Questions: Mary Butts's
Sacred Interrogative', Twentieth Century
Literature, vol. 49, no. 3, Autumn 2003,
pp. 360-387.
Esty, Jed, A Shrinking Island:
Modernism and National Culture in
England, Oxford: Princeton University
Press 2004.
Foy,
Roslyn Reso, Ritual Myth and Mysticism
in the Work of Mary Butts: Between Feminism and
Modernism, Fayetteville:
University of
Arkansas Press, 2000.
Garrity, Jane, Step-Daughters of England:
British Women Modernists and the National
Imaginary, Manchester: Manchester
University Press
2003.
---, “Mary Butts’s Fantastical Pédérasterie:
Queer Urban Life in 1920s London and Paris”, Jane
Garrity and Laura Doan (eds.), Sapphic Modernities:
Sexuality, Women and National
Culture, New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2006, pp. 233-252.
Hamer, Mary, ‘Mary Butts, Mothers, and War’,
Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (eds.), Women’s Fiction and
the Great War, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997, pp. 219-240.
Hoberman, Ruth, Gendering Classicism: The
Ancient World in Twentieth Century Women's
Fiction, New York: State University of
New York Press, 1997.
Marcus, Laura, 'Mysterious Mary Butts', Times Literary
Supplement, 24 August 2001, pp. 3-4.
Patterson, Ian Kenneth, 'Mary Butts', Cultural Critique and Canon
Formation 1910-1937: A Study in Modernism and Cultural
Memory,
University of Cambridge Ph.D., 1996.
---, ‘‘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.
Radford, Andrew, 'Defending
Nature’s Holy Shrine: Mary Butts, Englishness, and
the Persephone Myth', Journal of
Modern Literature,
Vol. 29, no., Winter 2006, pp.126-149.
Rainey, Lawrence, ‘Good things: Paederasty and Jazz
and Opium and Research’, London Review of Books, 16
July 1998.
Rives, Rochelle, “Problem Space: Mary Butts,
Modernism, and the Etiquette of Placement”,
modernism/modernity,
vol. 12, no. 4, pp607-627.
Wagstaff, Christopher (ed.), A Sacred Quest: The Life
and Writings of Mary Butts, New York: McPherson &
Company, 1995.
Wormald, Mark, 'Not to be
forgotten', Times Literary
Supplement, 2 May 2003.
Wright, Patrick, ‘Coming
back to the shores of Albion: The Secret England of Mary
Butts (1890-1937)’, On Living in an Old
Country: The National Past in Contemporary
Britain, London: Verso, 1985.
---, Wright, Patrick The Village that
Died for England: The Strange Story of
Tynham,
London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.
See links for other things written
about Mary Butts on the internet, and for links to her
publishers.