Mary Butts
Mary Butts was an English writer born on December 13, 1890, in Poole, Dorset. Growing up at her family's country estate, she had early exposure to the natural world and artistic influences, notably the works of William Blake, which shaped her literary vision. Educated in the classics by her father and constrained by her mother’s Victorian ideals, Butts navigated a complex family dynamic that persisted throughout her life. She began publishing poetry and essays at a young age and went on to study at Westfield College and the London School of Economics.
Butts's personal life was marked by a brief marriage to publisher John Rodker, with whom she had a daughter, followed by a bohemian lifestyle in London and Paris, particularly with critic Cecile Maitland. Her literary works include novels like *Ashe of Rings* and *Armed with Madness*, reflecting her modernist influences and thematic preoccupations with history and nature. She published an autobiography titled *The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns* in 1937. Butts passed away later that year from complications of an ulcer, and her writings have since been republished to highlight her contributions as an unacknowledged woman writer in modern literature.
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Mary Butts
Writer
- Born: December 13, 1890
- Birthplace: Poole, Dorset, England
- Died: March 5, 1937
- Place of death: Cornwall, England
Biography
Mary Butts, the daughter of Frederick John Butts, a retired sea captain, and Mary Jane Briggs Butts was born on December 13, 1890, in Poole, Dorset, England. She spent her childhood at Salterns, her family’s country estate, where she communed with the natural world. Her great-grandfather, Captain Thomas Butts, had been a patron of William Blake, the artist and poet, and the family residence housed a collection of Blake’s artwork. This artwork influenced the artistic vision of Butts, who often explored the supernatural in her writing. Intellectually, she was shaped by the influence of her father, who grounded her in the classics and inspired a sense of independent thought. In contrast, her mother promoted a conventional Victorian role for her, producing a lifelong family conflict.
Butts’s father died when she was fourteen; shortly after, she attended boarding school at St. Leonard School for Girls in Scotland. Her first publications appeared in 1906 in The Outlook and included a sonnet, “The Heavenward Side,” and an essay, “The Poetry of Hymns.” She continued writing poetry while attending Westfield College in London from 1909 through 1912, then transferred to the London School of Economics, where she received a social science certificate in 1914.
In 1918, Butts married John Rodker, a publisher and a poet. Their daughter, Camilla, was born November 7, 1920, and the couple soon after divorced following Rodker’s discovery of Butts’s extramarital affair with Cecile Maitland, a critic of author James Joyce. With her daughter in the care of an aunt, Butts began publishing short stories and lived a bohemian existence with Maitland in London and Paris until 1925, when they separated. The following year, her first novel, Ashe of Rings, part war story, part fairy tale, was published. Her second novel, Armed with Madness, published in 1928, is a modern retelling of the quest for the Holy Grail.
Suffering from depression, Butts lived briefly with her mother in 1930 before marrying the artist Gabriel Aitken. In 1932, “Corfe,” a poem about a castle, appeared in An “Objectivists” Anthology. The poem is representative of Butts’s body of work in its concerns with history, time, and the natural world. In 1932, Butts and Aitken moved to Sennen Cove in Cornwall, but they separated the following year. Butts’s autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns, which focuses on her early years, was published in 1937. The book’s title is from a Blake poem. Butts died in 1937 in Cornwall from complications of an ulcer.
Butts shares many of the sensibilities of other modernist writers, such as Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and H.D. She produced poetry, short stories, novels, pamphlets, reviews, and an autobiography. Much of her out-of-print work was republished during the 1990’s in an effort to reclaim the work of unacknowledged women writers.