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Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life : A Biography |
List Price: $35.00
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Description:
Mary Butts fraternized with Hemingway, was courted by Virgil Thompson, and lived a wild life in the Paris of the 1920, where some in the modernist movement considered her a better writer than Katherine Mansfield. But Mary Butts is not a familiar literary name, and even during her own life, her writings remained obscure, spiraling further into oblivion following her premature death in 1937. Biographer Nathalie Blondel resurrects the forgotten life of Mary Butts in this rare biography. Butts's writings may have fallen into a literary no man's land, but her life story was luckily preserved through her meticulously written memoirs, letters, and the testaments from her better known acquaintances. Blondel allows these sources to speak for themselves in this biography. Butts is revealed as a highly complex and difficult woman who despised her mother, abandoned her child, and was obsessed with expensive art. She experimented with opium and was fascinated with the supernatural. This fascination is reflected in several of her works including the mythical short story collection From Altar to Chimney-Piece. Yet Butts's works never gained more than a small following. Blondel doesn't obsess over the "hows" and "whys" of Butts's failure to reach the same levels of literary notoriety as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Yet it is Butts's image as a lost writer which remains with us. This is sad testament to an important literary figure.
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