Blaming the Brontës: Book(ish) Reviews from the 1930s

Mary Butts (1890-1937) was a prolific writer of novels, stories, and essays, and over the past twenty-five years much of her writing has been devotedly restored to print. Though she was more often noted for her famous literary friendships, reckless life, and early death, her distinctive voice is now recognized for its contribution to literary Modernism. As her books have been reissued they've captivated various writers and critics, among them poets John Ashbery and Marie Ponsot, who describes Butts's novels as "haunted with a sense of invisible life that we all know about but don't have much in the way of language for" The Telegraph compares her work to "the rambling and chaotic but strangely haunting fiction of John Cowper Powys," and the London Review ofBooks calls one of her novels "a masterpiece of Modernist prose," We here present five of this author's many book reviews, which range in subject from Alexander the Great to gardens and gardening, all of which will appear in the Collected Essays, due out next year from McPherson & Co.

A Biographical Problem: Katherine Mansfield's Early Life

Review of The Life of Katherine Mansfield, by R. E. Mantz and J. Middleton Murry. The Sunday Times, 31 December 1933, p. 6.

Until quite recently the celebrated dead simply died, and, apart from their work, or a notable scandal, left few traces. Some time passed before anything was done about it; research might not begin until the world had finally made up its mind. Or immediately after death someone might compose a high toned obituary, and some, like Donne, had luck with Walton, but it was not until posterity was absolutely sure that a microscope was turned on the events of their lives from the cradle to the grave. By which time most of the material had vanished—and a great pity, too, when one thinks of such a book that was published lately on Sir Kenelm Digby and his Lady,¹ a a good study, starved of material, about a pair so fascinating that one cried out to know more. What was her unique magic, and why did he call in a great painter to record her an hour after her death? People are not going to allow that sort of thing to happen again, and newly available fish of history to slip through their fingers for lack of scrutiny. Until one is tempted to wonder if, when the deceased justifies it at all, whether it is the wealth of documents or the subject that originates the memoir.

Question of reticence

After all, no one knows what the originals think about it. Rarely do they leave instructions to their literary executors to go into every detail. Especially, one would imagine, of their early lives, when they were finding out what they were good for; and frequently did and wrote silly things in the course of the search. One supposes that Miss Mantz and Mr. Murry know best, but it is surprising to think that a highly self-conscious nature like Katherine Mansfield's would have asked for a close-up of her immaturity. However, given the material and the determination—the conviction that everything about her is of importance—it could not be better done, though I for one would have given many pages of adolescent meditations for more about the exciting times in early New Zealand.

While with the minutiae there are reticences. This raises one of the most difficult questions in biography, but one cannot help feeling that, in the matter of her first marriage, one should have been told either more—or less. One sentence raises a gasp. What had the girl been up to? Surely the incident should have been buried altogether; or else, to put it mildly, it was an event that is so significant of character and must have had such consequences in her interior life that something more should be said about it.

The brontes responsible

It is the Brontes who are largely responsible. Those women did not properly appreciate...