The Journals of Mary Butts

Book excerpt: divdivBritish modernist writer Mary Butts (1890–1937), now recognized as one of the most important and original authors of the interwar years, lived an unconventional life. She encountered many of the most famous figures in early twentieth-century literature, music, and art—among them T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein—and came to know some of them intimately. These luminaries figure prominently in journals in which Butts chronicled the development of her craft between 1916 and her untimely death in 1937. This volume is the first substantial edition of her journals. Introduced and annotated by Nathalie Blondel, the leading authority on Butts’s life and works, the book reveals the workings of a complex and distinctive mind while offering vivid insights into her fascinating era. /DIV/DIV