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Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life Book

Mary Butts fraternized with Hemingway, was courted by Virgil Thompson, and lived a wild life in the Paris of the 1920, where some in the modernist movement considered her a better writer than Katherine Mansfield. But Mary Butts is not a familiar literary name, and even during her own life, her writings remained obscure, spiraling further into oblivion following her premature death in 1937. Biographer Nathalie Blondel resurrects the forgotten life of Mary Butts in this rare biography. Butts's writings may have fallen into a literary no man's land, but her life story was luckily preserved through her meticulously written memoirs, letters, and the testaments from her better known acquaintances. Blondel allows these sources to speak for themselves in this biography. Butts is revealed as a highly complex and difficult woman who despised her mother, abandoned her child, and was obsessed with expensive art. She experimented with opium and was fascinated with the supernatural. This fascination is reflected in several of her works including the mythical short story collection From Altar to Chimney-Piece. Yet Butts's works never gained more than a small following. Blondel doesn't obsess over the "hows" and "whys" of Butts's failure to reach the same levels of literary notoriety as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Yet it is Butts's image as a lost writer which remains with us. This is sad testament to an important literary figure. Read More

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  • Product Description

    Her notorious lifestyle in London and France in the 1920s?smoking opium with Jean Cocteau, studying magic with Aleister Crowley, or throwing parties for Evelyn Waugh and Paul Robeson?overshadowed the importance of her work. The last decade, however, has seen a resurgence of interest in Mary Butts the writer, and her work has joined that of her contemporaries, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, for its centrality to literary Modernism. Since 1991, McPherson & Company has issued four uniform volumes of her writings (with more to come), a volume of critical essays, and now the first biography of this great lost Modernist.

    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 are allowed as far as possible to tell the story in their own words. This biography features many unpublished letters, photographs, passages of diaries and poems; and makes extensive use of Mary Butts?s own remarkable journal, kept for the last twenty years of her life. Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life is ideally suited for general readers interested in the era and for scholars of this exceptional author.

  • 0929701550
  • 9780929701554
  • Nathalie Blondel
  • 12 March 1998
  • McPherson & Co Publishers,U.S.
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 554
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