Mary Butts

Mary Buttswas a distinctive and original voice within the Modernism movement. She was a prodigy of style, learning, and energy, who wrote with powerful insight about the Lost Generation. She was born in 1890 in Dorset, England, a great-granddaughter of Sir Thomas Butts, William Blake’s patron. By the time of her premature death in 1937, her work had gained a formidable reputation, hailed for her brave originality and stylistic panache. Her many stories, novels, and poems were compared with the work of Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot. Her career was championed by Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, Ford Madox Ford, Charles Williams, and May Sinclair.