Mary Butts
| Mary Butts | |
|---|---|
| Born | 13 December 1890 |
| Died | 5 March 1937 (aged 46) |
| Occupation | novelist |
| Nationality | British |
Mary Franeis Butts (13 December 1890 – 5 March 1937) was a British modernist writer. Her work found recognition in literary magazines such as The Bookman and The Little Review, as well as from fellow modernists, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and Bryher. After her death, her works fell into obscurity until they began to be republished in the 1980s.
Mary Franeis Butts was born in Britain on 13 December 1890, at Poole in Dorset, the daughter of Captain Frederick John Butts and Mary Jane Butts (née Briggs). She had a younger brother, Anthony. Her great-grandfather was Thomas Butts, the friend of William Blake, the poet and artist. She was brought up at Salterns, an 18th-century house overlooking Poole Harbour (described in her book, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns), where she became an admirer of the Blake watercolors which her father had inherited. In 1905 her father died; after which she was sent for a boarding school education at St Leonard's school for girls in St Andrews (1905–1908). In 1906 her mother sold the Blake paintings and in 1907 remarried. From 1909 to 1912 Mary studied at Westfield College in London, where she first became aware of her bisexual feelings. She did not complete a degree there, but was sent down for organising a trip to Epsom races. She went on to study at the London School of Economics, from which she graduated in 1914.
She became a student of the occultist Aleister Crowley. She and other students worked with Crowley on his Magick (Book 4) (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 the first years of World War I, she was living in London, undertaking social work for the London County Council in Hackney Wick, and in a lesbian relationship. She then met the modernist poet, John Rodker, a pacifist at that time hiding in Dorking with fellow poet and pacifist Robert Trevelyan. In May 1918 she married Rodker, and in November 1920 gave birth to their daughter, Camilla Elizabeth. Butts also adopted Rodker's pacifism. She helped Rodker to set up as a publisher, and through him she met several modernist writers, including Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, Roger Fry and May Sinclair. But shortly after the birth of her daughter she began a liaison with Cecil Maitland.
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