Additional information
by Mary Butts (Author), Joel Hawkes (Editor)
Author Biography
A distinctive and original voice within the Modernism movement, the English novelist Mary Butts was a prodigy of style, learning, and energy who wrote with powerful insight about the Lost Generation. She was born in 1890 in Dorset, England, a great-granddaughter of Sir Thomas Butts, William Blake's patron. By the time of her premature death in 1937, her work had gained a formidable reputation. Hailed for their brave originality and stylistic panache, her many stories, novels, and poems were mentioned in comparison with Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. Her career was championed variously by Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, Ford Madox Ford, Charles Williams, Evelyn Waugh and May Sinclair. Her flamboyant lifestyle in London and France in the 1920s unfortunately overshadowed the importance of her work. Over the last several decades, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in Mary Butts the writer, and, after being lost for more than 50 years, her work has joined her contemporaries H.D., Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, and Mina Loy, in the pantheon of literary Modernism. Joel Hawkes is an English scholar of Modernism and teaches in Canada at the University of Victoria, BC. His research is particularly concerned with the physical, cultural and imaginative spaces we create and inhabit, and their ritual nature. He is also the editor of a volume of essays titled Mary Butts: Conflicts, Contradictions, and Feminist Reconstructions, which is forthcoming in 2022 from Bloomsbury Press.
