Mary Francis Butts

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Mary Butts at the age of 29

Mary Francis Butts (born December 13, 1890 in Poole , † March 5, 1937 in Penzance ) was an English writer of literary modernism . Her work has found recognition in literary magazines such as The Bookman and The Little Review, as well as TS Eliot , HD and Bryher . After her death, her works were forgotten until they were published again in the 1980s.

Family and studies

Butts was the daughter of Mary Jane (née Briggs) and Frederick John Butts. She had a younger brother, Anthony. Her great grandfather was Thomas Butts, a friend of William Blake . She grew up in Salterns and became an admirer of the Blake watercolors her father inherited. Her father died in 1905; then she was sent to St. Leonard's girls' school in St Andrews (1905-1908). Her mother sold Blake's paintings in 1906 and remarried in 1907. From 1909 to 1912 Mary studied at Westfield College in London , where she did not graduate. It was there that she first became aware of her bisexual feelings. She then studied at the London School of Economics , which she graduated in 1914.

Life

She became a student as Soror Rhodon of the occultist Aleister Crowley and was a co-author of Crowley's book Magick Book 4 (1912).

In 1916 she began to keep a diary, which she kept until the year she died.

During the first years of the First World War she lived in London, where she did social work for the London County Council in Hackney Wick and was in a lesbian relationship. Then she met the poet John Rodker , a pacifist who was hiding in Dorking with his poet colleague and pacifist Robert Trevelyan . On May 6, 1918, she married Rodker and gave birth to their daughter, Camilla Elizabeth, in November 1920. Butts adopted Rodker's pacifism and helped Rodker establish himself as a publisher. Through him she met several writers, including Ezra Pound , Wyndham Lewis , Ford Madox Ford , Roger Fry and May Sinclair . Shortly after the birth of her daughter, she began a relationship with Cecil Maitland.

In the early 1920s, Butts was mainly in Paris , where she made friends with several writers and artists, including the painter Cedric Morris and the artist, poet, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau , who illustrated her book Imaginary Letters (1928). In mid-1921 she and Maitland spent about twelve weeks in Aleister Crowley's Thelema Abbey in Sicily ; she found the practices there shocking and became a drug addict. In 1922 and 1923, she and Maitland lived near Tyneham , Dorset . Her novels of the 1920s shape the Dorset landscape. In 1923 her story book Speed ​​the Plow and other stories was published ; In 1925 followed her first novel Ashe of Rings , which was published by Robert McAlmon .

A portrait of Mary Butts was painted by Cedric Morris in 1924 and a portrait drawing of her was done by Jean Cocteau .

In 1927 she and Rodker were divorced. In 1930 she married the homosexual artist William Park "Gabriel" Atkin or Aitken (1897–1937). From then on Mary called herself Aitken but kept her maiden name for her writings. After a period in London and Newcastle, they settled in Sennen on the Penwith peninsula on the western tip of Cornwall in 1932 . The marriage failed in 1934.

Butts was an ardent conservationist and attacked pollution of the English countryside in her pamphlets Warning To Hikers and Traps For Unbelievers .

In 1933 it was presented to the young writer Frank Baker in Sennen by George Manning-Sanders . Some time later, when Baker was living in St Hilary with his friend John Raynor , she and Baker met again and became friends. They became members of St. Hilary's Parish, where Father Bernard Walke performed nativity plays on the BBC .

death

Shortly before her death, she was working on a study on Emperor Julian the Apostle . She died at the age of 46 after an operation of a perforated gastric ulcer at West Cornwall Hospital in Penzance. Her funeral took place in St. Sennen's Church in Sennen. Her autobiography The Crystal Cabinet was published a few months after her death. Her brother Anthony committed suicide in 1941 by throwing himself out of the window.

Works

  • Speed ​​the Plow and other Stories , 1923
  • Ashe of Rings , 1925
  • Armed with Madness , 1928
  • Imaginary Letters , 1928
  • Death of Felicity Taverner , 1932
  • Traps for Unbelievers , 1932
  • Several Occasions , 1932
  • Warning to Hikers , 1932
  • The Macedonian , a study of king Alexander of Macedon, 1933
  • Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra , 1935
  • The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns , 1937
  • Last Stories , 1938

literature

  • Andrew Radford, Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism , CONTINNUUM 3PL, (2014), ISBN 978-1441138613
  • Nathalie Blondel The Journals of Mary Butts , Yale Univ Pr, (2002), ISBN 978-0300091847
  • R. Reso Foy, Ritual, Myth and Mysticism in the Work of Mary Butts ... , The University of Arkansas Press (2000) ISBN 978-1557285812
  • Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts Scenes from the Life , McPherson & Co Publishers, US (1998), ISBN 978-0929701554
  • C. Wagstaff, A Sacred Quest: the life and writings of Mary Butts , MCPHERSON & CO (1995), ISBN 978-0929701455

website

Commons : Mary Butts  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 9781403916921 , pp. 37-38
  2. ^ Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 9781403916921 , pp. 37-38
  3. ^ Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 9781403916921 , pp. 37-38
  4. ↑ HYMENAEUS BETA, Book 4, 2001 (PDF)
  5. ↑ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/blondel-butts.html
  6. ^ Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 9781403916921 , pp. 37-38
  7. ↑ http://weeklywire.com/ww/08-31-98/austin_books_feature1.html
  8. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20070803213134/http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/bloct98.htm
  9. ↑ Booth, Martin. A Magick Life: A Biography of Aleister Crowley, London: Hodder and Stoughtonl 2000, pp. 375-76. ISBN 0-340-71806-4 .
  10. ^ Patrick Wright, The Village that Died for England, Faber & Faber 2002, pp. 99-108, ISBN 978-0571214419
  11. ↑ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/31/reviews/980531.31byrnet.html
  12. ↑ http://specialcollections.wichita.edu/Collections/ms/89-02/89-2-A.HTML
  13. ^ Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 9781403916921 , pp. 37-38
  14. ^ William Plomer: A Biography by Peter F. Alexander, 1989
personal data
SURNAME Butts, Mary Francis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Aitken, Mary Francis (married name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English writer of literary modernism
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Poole
DATE OF DEATH March 5, 1937
Place of death Penzance