Mary Butts: Scenes From The Life

A distinctive and original voice within the Modernist movement,the English novelist Mary Butts was a prodigy of style, learning and energy, who wrote with powerful insight about the Lost Generation. At the time of her premature death in 1937 her novels and stories had gained a formidable reputation, and were compared with Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot. Her career was championed by Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, Ford Madox Ford, Charles Williams, and May Sinclair. Nathalie Blondel's superb biography will permanently alter the literary history of Modernism. It traces Mary Butts from her aristocratic childhood in Dorset, to her work campaigning for civil liberties in London during the First World War, on to her decadent period in France during the 1920s, and finally to her astonishingly productive last years in the west of Cornwall. Her important relationships are fully detailed, including her marriages, her close friendships with Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau and Virgil Thomson, and her love affairs with Mireille Havet and Cecil Maitland. Her friends, enemies, and lovers (Eliot, Pound, H.D., Douglas Goldring, Wyndham Lewis, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, Alec Waugh, Gertrude Stein, Elsa Lanchester, Quentin Bell, and many more) are allowed as far as possible to tell the story in their own words. This biography features many previously unpublished letters, photographs, passages of diaries and poems; and makes extensive use of Mary Butts's own remarkable journal, kept for the last 20 years of her life.

"Mary Butts is, perhaps, the most obscure of major modern writers. Although she wrote wonderful fiction, she was also a brilliant critic admired by readers of The Dial, The Bookman and Time and Tide. . . . [Blondel's] biography is detailed, clear, forceful; it is, like Carolyn Burke's biography of [Mina] Loy, a revelation of an extraordinary artist." — The Review of Contemporary Fiction

"In the first biography to be written about Butts, Nathalie Blondel... makes a strong case for Butts's importance, not only to the Modernist movement earlier this century but to many of today's feminist and environmental concerns. She achieves this by underscoring Butts's utter devotion to writing all her life, even when she was carrying on more like a rock star than a serious artist. Drugs, lesbianism, alcohol, witchcraft —  she did it all but always in service of her craft. . . .Stella Bowen, Ford Madox Ford's lover, once described Butts as inhabiting a 'cloud-cuckoo land of her own,' a view Blondel occasionally agrees with, but there is no condescension from her toward Butts's varied beliefs. Her respect for Butts as a writer dominates all, a refreshing attitude at a time when many biographers seem bent on humiliating their subjects. Anyone interested in the literary life of the 1920s will be fascinated by this book." — Washington Post Book World