cover image The Collected Essays of Mary Butts

The Collected Essays of Mary Butts

Edited by Joel Hawkes. McPherson & Co, $30 (400p) ISBN 978-1-62054-032-9

Book reviews, criticism, and essays come together in this erudite career-spanning collection of the writings of modernist Mary Butts (1890–1937). Hawkes (Mary Butts: Conflicts, Contradictions, and Feminist Reconstructions), an English professor at the University of Victoria, writes in his introduction that Butts’s reviews were “conversational and opinionated, and sprinkled with interesting asides,” and the pieces that follow span a wide range of books and topics. In her review of 1932’s Victorian Days and Ways by Mark Perugini, she revels in the book’s dedication to “the younger generation,” since it’s “more than anyone said to us” and in a review of two Jonathan Swift biographies, admires the biographers for “stand[ing] up to” him. She boldly critiques Ezra Pound’s Make It New (it’s “overloaded with learned terms”) and reveals in a longer essay on Aldous Huxley that “he began as a poet, the one thing one is certain that he is not.” The collection sings when Butts’s life peeks through, as when she recounts an experience that led her, as a child, to learn “what a short story could be.” Literature lovers will find much to consider in this varied collection. (Oct.)