Description
Butts, Mary; Blondel, Nathalie
Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002. Hardcover. First Edition. Editied and introduced by Nathalie Blondel. Minor shelf-wear, appears unread. Near Fine in unclipped dust-jacket.
Mary Butts became a student of the occultist Aleister Crowley. She and other students worked with Crowley on his Magick Book 4 in 1912 and were given co-authorship credit. In 1916, she began keeping the diary which she would maintain until the year of her death. In mid-1921 she and Maitland spent about twelve weeks at Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Sicily; she found the practices there shocking, and came away with a drug habit.
British 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 20th-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 contains her journals. Introduced and annotated by Nathalie Blondel, an authority on Butts’s life and works, the book reveals the workings of a complex and distinctive mind while offering insights into her fascinating era.
