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The Journals of Mary Butts. Mary Butts. Nathalie Blonde), ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. 499. $47.50 (cloth).
In these personal, presumably private writings, Mary Butts exposes a being made restive by her chafing at boundaries as diverse as gender, literary authority, and even the material world. She shows what it was like for an intelligent contemporary to encounter the works of writers now considered central, or nearly so, to modernism: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, H. D., Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw, and Fydor Dostoevsky. She spans the arts, sciences, and pseudo-sciences, alighting upon Bertrand Russell, Roger Fry, Constantin Brancusi, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jane Harrison, Albert Einstein and Aleister Crowley (the occultist she briefly hoped would serve her mystical interests). Her readings, and in some cases meetings, with these figures may serve a line of metaphysical thought (Yeats), offer a useful experiment in style (Joyce), a personal warning (West), or register a significant miss (H. G. Wells, along the same lines that disappointed Woolf). Regrettably, Butts's record and reactions are often only a sentence or two in length. Quotations from Violet Hunt and Ford at Selsey appear without context, and we find no details of a dinner with the Joyce family. One exception is an inventory of objects (but not paintings) at Gertrude Stein's apartment, where she collected composer Virgil Thomson's description of Eliot as "a 1st class or refined literary mortician" (253). Though she makes several references to the consumption of opium in various forms, Butts never says where.