13 Facts About Mary Butts

Mary Franeis Butts, Mary Rodker by marriage, was an English modernist writer.

Mary Butts's great-grandfather was Thomas Butts, the friend of William Blake, the poet and artist.

Mary Butts was brought up at Salterns, an 18th-century house overlooking Poole Harbour, where she became an admirer of the Blake watercolors which her father had inherited.

From 1909 to 1912 Mary studied at Westfield College in London, where she first became aware of her bisexual feelings.

Mary Butts did not complete a degree there, but was sent down for organising a trip to Epsom races.

Mary Butts went on to study at the London School of Economics, from which she graduated in 1914.

Mary Butts became a student of the occultist Aleister Crowley.

Mary Butts then met the modernist poet, John Rodker, a pacifist at that time hiding in Dorking with fellow poet and pacifist Robert Trevelyan.

In 1928, Mary Butts published Armed with Madness a novel featuring experimental Modernist writing revolving around the Grail legend.

Mary Butts was an ardent advocate of nature conservation, and attacked the pollution of the English countryside in her pamphlets Warning To Hikers and Traps For Unbelievers.

Mary Butts died on 5 March 1937, at the age of forty-six, at the West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, after an operation for a perforated gastric ulcer.

Mary Butts's funeral was held at St Sennen's Church, Sennen.

Mary Butts's papers are held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.