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 good starting-points; here her work is at its most accessible and dynamic. Armed with Madness is perhaps her most widely read novel and, sharing much thematic content with T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”, best represents her modernist experimentation. This bibliography gives an overview of Butts' work and critical studies of her. Nathalie Blondel's Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life gives a definitive bibliography of Butts’ published output, including her prolific reviewing during the 1930s and the poems and short stories she published in little magazines.

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).

Camilla Bagg and Nathalie Blondel (eds.), 'Bloomsbury', modernism/modernity, vol. 5, no.2 (1998), pp. 35-45.

Ashe of Rings and Other Writings, New York: McPherson & Co. (1998). Includes the short story ‘Imaginary Letters’, the pamphlets ‘Warning to Hikers’ and ‘Traps for Unbelievers’, and the essay ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’.

Armed with Madness, London: Penguin (2001). This edition has recently gone out of print.

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).

Critical works on Mary Butts

Blondel, Nathalie, 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 Liverpool Ph.D. (1989).

---, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life, New York: McPherson & Co. (1998).

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 Fanatical Pédérastie: 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.

Hainley, Bruce, "Quite Contrary: Mary Butts's Wild Queendom", Voice Literary Supplement, (May 1994), pp. 21-22.

Hanscombe, Gillian, and Virginia Smyers, "Mary Butts, Mina Loy, and the Dead Language of Amor", Writing for Their Lives: The Modernist Women, 1910-1940, London: The Women's Press (1987), pp.107-128.

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).

Kessler, Jascha, "Recovering Mary Butts: Beauty and the Beast", The Bookpress, vol. 3, no. 7 (October 1993), pp. 1, 12-14.

Kessler, Jascha, "Mary Butts: Lost... And Found", The Kenyon Review, New Series, vol. 17, no. 3/4 (Summer - Autumn, 1995), pp. 206-218.

Kroll, Jennifer, “Mary Butts's "Unrest Cure" for The Waste Land”, Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 45, no. 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 159-173.


Marcus, Laura, “Playing the Sacred Game”, Times Literary Supplement (24 August 2001), pp. 3-4. Review of Armed with Madness and Scenes from the Life.

Matless, David, "A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts", Cultural Geographies, vol. 15, no. 3 (2008), pp. 335-357.


Patterson, Ian Kenneth, 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).

Perloff, Marjorie, ““Barbed-Wire Entanglements”: The “New American Poetry,” 1930-1932”, modernism/modernity vol. 2 no. 1 (1995) pp. 145-175.

Radford, Andrew, “Defending Nature’s Holy Shrine: Mary Butts, Englishness, and the Persephone Myth”, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 29, no. 3 (Winter 2006), pp.126-149.

Rainey, Lawrence, “Good things: Paederasty and Jazz and Opium and Research”, London Review of Books, (16 July 1998). Review of Scenes from the Life, The Taverner Novels, The Classical Novels, and Ashe of Rings.

Rives, Rochelle, “Problem Space: Mary Butts, Modernism, and the Etiquette of Placement”, modernism/modernity, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 607-627.

Wagstaff, Christopher (ed.), A Sacred Quest: The Life and Writings of Mary Butts, New York: McPherson & Co. (1995).

Wormald, Mark, “Not to be forgotten”, Times Literary Supplement (2 May 2003), pp. 11-12. Review of Journals.

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).

---, The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of Tynham, London: Jonathan Cape (1995).