A Candle For Mary Butts
We dedicated our recent exhibition - Sanctuary - at Parallax Art Fair, to the flame-haired early feminist and novelist Mary Franeis Butts (1890 – 1937). Thought by many to be the equal of TS Eliot, James Joyce and DH Lawrence, she is currently being rediscovered by a new generation of readers. She was also, fortuitously, my grandmother. If Mary found sanctuary in her writing, in long days at her desk in Rue de Montessuy, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, then she also found sanctuary in long nights among the the refugees, writers, emigrés and artistes of the salons, restaurants, cafés and nightclubs of Montparnasse, Montmartre, Le Marais, and Paris St. Germain. Perhaps she finally found sanctuary in her isolated fisherman’s cottage, Tebel Vos, at the furthermost reach of the Cornish peninsula.
A fully paid-up member of the Lost Generation she was variously friend, associate, acquaintance and confidante to Jean Cocteau, André Breton, Aleister Crowley, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, TS Eliot, Peggy Guggenheim, Evelyn Waugh, Wyndham Lewis, Roger Fry, Ezra Pound, John Rodker - to whom she was briefly married - The Woolfs, Mireille Havet, James Joyce and Paul and Essie Robeson, among many others, but it is the forensic nature of her Diaries which uniquely illuminates the age. Indeed, her essays, novels, Times literary criticism and diaries now find sanctuary at the Beinecke Library at the University of Yale. Our exhibition hopes to publicise this remarkable early feminist and, more generally, to promote the pursuit of personal sanctuary, in meditation and reflection, in our own daily lives – a matter of which Mary would surely approve.
A fully paid-up member of the Lost Generation she was variously friend, associate, acquaintance and confidante to Jean Cocteau, André Breton, Aleister Crowley, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, TS Eliot, Peggy Guggenheim, Evelyn Waugh, Wyndham Lewis, Roger Fry, Ezra Pound, John Rodker - to whom she was briefly married - The Woolfs, Mireille Havet, James Joyce and Paul and Essie Robeson, among many others, but it is the forensic nature of her Diaries which uniquely illuminates the age. Indeed, her essays, novels, Times literary criticism and diaries now find sanctuary at the Beinecke Library at the University of Yale. Our exhibition hopes to publicise this remarkable early feminist and, more generally, to promote the pursuit of personal sanctuary, in meditation and reflection, in our own daily lives – a matter of which Mary would surely approve.