The Collected Essays of Mary Butts

The eleven essays and 117 literary reviews gathered in this book were written largely between 1932 and 1937, the most productive period of Mary Butts's foreshortened literary career---she died at 47. After spending most of the 'twenties on the Continent, principally Paris, with the madding American and English survivors of the soi-disant "Lost Generation," she repatriated to London before settling with a new husband permanently in Sennen, a Cornish village close to Land's End. Famously...
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The eleven essays and 117 literary reviews gathered in this book were written largely between 1932 and 1937, the most productive period of Mary Butts's foreshortened literary career---she died at 47. After spending most of the 'twenties on the Continent, principally Paris, with the madding American and English survivors of the soi-disant "Lost Generation," she repatriated to London before settling with a new husband permanently in Sennen, a Cornish village close to Land's End. Famously impractical about money, she must have welcomed the editor Hugh Ross Williamson's invitation to review for The Bookman as a means to supplement her small allowance and book royalties. Considering her charming and personal reviews, this work must have given her satisfaction; it is surely not hackwork. Within a short time she was engaged to write reviews and essays for other prominent journals and newspapers, including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Manchester Guardian, The London Mercury, Time and Tide, John O'London Weekly, The Adelphi, Everyman, and even Crime-which she accomplished while somehow maintaining a steady production of stories, novels, and a memoir of her childhood, and all of this despite marital strife, financial pressures, and worsening health. For the shorter pieces, as a reviewer for hire, it's doubtful she had much choice of books, but her keenest interests and expertise-as well as friendships with contemporary authors-were probably known to her editors, who commissioned accordingly. The range, variety, and depth of subjects is little short of remarkable, from classical literature to popular fiction (historicals, mysteries, the uncanny), from history (French and English) to Eastern religion to the American Depression to gardening, and on and on. Moreover, "reviews" is a misnomer for most of Butts's shorter pieces because her approach is conversational and opinionated, and sprinkled with interesting asides. Better to think of them as miniature essays. Her erudition can be formidable, her thought associations eclectic, her tone scholarly, elegant, jazzy or passionate. However, her longer essays-concerning Aldous Huxley, Baron Corvo, and supernatural fiction, for example-are more like English gardens: structured and carefully tended, but allowing for spaces of intellectual play.