Mary Butts – лучшие книги

British modernist writer Mary Butts (1890-1937), now recognized as one of the most important and original authors of the interwar years, lived an unconventional life. She encountered many of the most famous figures in early twentieth-century literature, music, and art – among them T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein – and came to know some of them intimately. These luminaries figure prominently in journals in which Butts chronicled the development of her craft between 1916 and her untimely death in 1937.

This volume is the first substantial edition of her journals. Introduced and annotated by Nathalie Blondel, the leading authority on Butts’ life and works, the book reveals the workings of a complex and distinctive mind while offering vivid insights into her fascinating era.

This Excellent historical novel by British-born writer Mary Butts is the story one of the world's most legendary women. Butts presents Cleopatra and her story in a completely new light. Eschewing the popular notions of Cleopatra as presented by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Shaw, in which Cleopatra is presented either as a tender martyr or a mindless hussy, Butts presents the reader with a figure of a great ruler, who had to choose her lovers in order that her kingdom could survive, but who recognized throughout the danger and potential of those choices.

The short stories of Mary Butts possess an intriguing relation to the present moment. "Lost" for sixty years, they reappear now with freshness and panache, capturing that mixture of hopeful anxiety which describes the contemporary vogue, including our various fascinations with "realities" usually beyond physical experience. The power of hidden things and the things of hidden power preoccupy these sixteen distinctive tales of unusual love and betrayal, magic and mummery, belief and folly. Here, in the realm of active imagination, the veil between natural and supernatural may be rent apart in an instant, and just as quickly restored. As John Ashbery remarks in the preface, "After reading Butts one is left with an impression of dazzle, of magic, but what made it is hard to pin down...One keeps getting the feeling that these stories were written yesterday."

The novelist and poet Glenway Wescott declared Mary Butts's first collection of stories, Speed the Plough, "the announcement of a new intellect, acute and passionate, to scrutinize experience with an unfamiliar penetration," which he then compared epochally with James Joyce's Dubliners. Concurrently, Marianne Moore, HD and Ford Madox Ford championed her work, and during her tragically brief lifetime Mary Butts's reputation rivaled Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf for stylistic innovation. That style is swift, elliptical and emotionally charged, exactly matching the free wheeling lives of her characters in Paris and London and their explosive era. Yet these "acute and passionate" stories transcend details of time or place or class, offering an uncompromising vision of human motivations and spirit.

These two novels, Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner-out of print since originally published in 1928 and 1932-form what is almost certainly her masterpiece, a mythic yet contemporary tale of struggle against spiritual alienation.

On the remote southwestern coast along the English Channel, a group of young bohemians have gathered, in retreat from the psychological cataclysm of World War and in search of a moral value on which to base their lives. Armed with Madness begins by invoking an ancient enchantment, a numinous vision of coincident reality, where love can also lead to insanity. Scylla Taverner, her brother Felix, her soon-to-be lover Picus, and their closely knit circle of English, Russian and American friends, retrieve an ancient chalice, which may be the Sanc-Grail. Together they enter upon a psychological and sexual exploration fraught with exhilarating possibility and violent consequence.

Five years later, in Death of Felicity Taverner the quest is renewed, this time to discover a buried truth. Was Felicity's death accidental? A suicide? Or a murder? As the mystery unravels, Felicity's opportunistic widower unveils a plan with a vacation-home development, inciting a drama played out between conscience and evil.