Armed With Madness

About the author

Mary Butts was born in 1890 in Dorset where she spent her childhood. She studied Latin and Greek at Westfield College, London, and social work at the London School of Economics. During the First World War she worked for the London County Council and then the National Council for Civil Liberties. In 1918 she married John Rodker, a poet, publisher and conscientious objector, with whom she had a daughter, Camilla. She began publishing poems and stories in important literary reviews of the time, including The Little Review, The Dial and The Egoist. She spent most of the 1920s in France, moving in literary and artistic circles in the company, among others, of Gertrude Stein, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), William Carlos Williams, and Ford Madox Ford. Her most important literary friendship was with Jean Cocteau who provided drawings for editions of two of her works. Speed the Plough and Other Stories appeared in 1923 and Ashe of Rings, her first novel, in 1925. Her second novel, Armed with Madness, was published in 1928, as was the novella Imaginary Letters.

In 1930 she returned to England, finally settling in Cornwall with her second husband, Gabriel Aitken. She published two historical novels, The Macedonian (1933) and Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (1935), as well as a further volume of stories. She also reviewed extensively for a number of magazines and papers. Mary Butts died in 1937. Her autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet, was published posthumously that same year.

Although a figure on the literary scene and in contact with many of the important writers of the time, Butts remained marginal: her interests and writing put her out of line with any group or movement. Largely forgotten after her death, her work is now being rediscovered and her particular contribution as a modernist writer reassessed.

Stephen Heath is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.