A Sacred Quest: The Life and Writings of Mary Butts Ed. by Christopher Wagstaff

'She drank with Hemingway and prowled with Jean Cocteau, who did several portraits of her. She was courted by Virgil Thomson; counted H.D. and Djuna Barnes among her friends; was photographed by Man Ray. Virginia Woolf hated her perfume. Everyone noted her bright red hair. She experimented with drugs and explored "magick" with Aleister Crowley. Somehow, despite her mad life she found time to write; her stories appeared in Ford Madox Ford's Transatlantic Review and Ezra Pound's Little Review, and her first published novel was issued by Robert McAlmon's famous Contact Editions. Hailed at the time for their daring originality and stylistic panache, her novels, stories and poetry remained "lost" for fifty years after her premature death in 1937. 

 Now that Mary Butts's writings are largely back in print after long neglect, Christopher Wagstaff's indispensible sourcebook, A Sacred Quest: The Life and Writings of Mary Butts, gathers essays from writers who knew Mary Butts and her work in the '20s and '30s, and from writers today who have reappraised her. There is a representative selection of Mary Butts's own poetry, fiction, journal entries, letters and literary criticism, as well as new interviews with Quentin Bell, Virgil Thomson, Hugh Ross Williamson and Eugene MacCown, along with up-to-date bibliographical information. Combining the personal dimensions of literary biography with original source materials and first-rate criticism, A Sacred Quest provides a valuable key to a major modern author whose importance is only now being understood in the history of Modernism, feminism and the avant-garde.'