From Altar to Chimney-Piece — Mary Butts

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.