Editor's Preface: Bloomsbury
- Bloomsbury
Editors’ Preface
Mary Butts (1890–1937) is increasingly recognized by discerning critics as the author of two genuine masterpieces of modernist fiction, Armed with Madness (1928) and Death of Felicity Taverner (1932). Though she was praised by contemporaries as varied as Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford, her work’s reputation suffered a mysterious decline after her death, a decline from which it has recovered only recently when it has been redisovered and praised by poets and critics such as John Ashbery, Ruth Hobermann, Robin Blaser, and Thomas McEvilley. 1
Butts was a prolific author. In addition to the two novels already mentioned, she wrote a third (her first, actually), Ashe of Rings (1925), two historical narratives, The Macedonian (1933) and Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (1935), an epistolary prose sequence titled Imaginary Letters (1928), an autobiography titled The Crystal Cabinet (1937), and three volumes of short stories (Speed the Plough and Other Stories [1923], Several Occasions [1932], and the posthumous collection, Last Stories [1938]), as well as numerous essays, pamphlets, poems, and book reviews.
Born in Dorset, she moved to London in 1909, where she later married John Rodker, best known as a small publisher of deluxe editions, including Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec (London: Ovid Press, 1920) and Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (London: Ovid Press, 1920). During the 1920s she divorced Rodker and lived primarily in Paris and Villefranche, a town on the Mediterranean coast, though she also returned to London for occasional visits. She figures prominently in the memoirs of British and American expatriates in the 1920s, and she became especially close to Jean Cocteau. In 1930 she moved back to [End Page 31] England, where she resided in a village on the West coast of Cornwall. A few years later she converted to Anglo-Catholicism. 2
The essay “Bloomsbury” was originally written in 1936 for Lord Gorell, the editor of The Cornhill, but was declined on the perplexing grounds that the people who made up Bloomsbury were not widely enough known. The present version is a briefer one that she may have hoped to resubmit elsewhere. (It has been lightly edited, but respects Butts’s spelling and punctuation; the notes have been kept to a minimum.) Butts’s assessment of Bloomsbury, while colored by her Anglo-Catholicism, is generous and astute, and the essay is notable for her personal recollections of Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound. All of them also figure in the unpublished memoirs which Butts kept from 1916 to her death in 1937, currently being edited for publication by Nathalie Blondel and recently purchased by the Beinecke Library of Yale University. They offer an eyewitness account of many of the most important figures in Anglo-American modernism.
Footnotes
1. See John Ashbery, “Preface” to Mary Butts, From Altar to Chimney-piece (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 1992), vii–xii; Ruth Hoberman, Gendering Classicism: The Ancient World in Twentieth Century Women’s Historical Studies (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1997), 233–47; Robin Blaser, ‘”Here Lies the Woodpecker Who Was Zeus”’, in A Sacred Quest: The Life and Writings of Mary Butts, ed. Christopher Wagstaff (McPherson & Co., 1995), 159–223. Thomas McEvilley, “Preface” to The Classical Novels of Mary Butts (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 1994), vii–xi. See also Marianne Moore, “A House-Party” (a review of Armed With Madness, in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia Willis (New York: Penguin, 1986), 146–48
2. The most complete account of her life, including a full bibliography of her writings, is given by Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 1998).
