Mary Butts
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authentic Englishness. Beginning her career as a modernist,
attracted considerable attention and praise (together with controversy) during her lifetime. By the time of her death she was seen primarily as a religious or mystical writer, and after it her writing remained largely neglected until a revival of interest in the 1990s.
published five novels, three collections of short stories, some poems, a memoir, and several essays (one of which denounces the Bloomsbury Group). Her subjects ranged from the Great War and war trauma to history, religion, mysticism, and classical mythology. Her expressions of ecological concern (laments for the destruction of nature and the countryside by hikers and industrialisation) take a conservative, elitist, even racialist stance and set a premium on - BirthName: Mary Franeis ButtsFrancis.) Her father wrote the name in their family bible as Franeis, but herself occasionally spelled it Franies.'s second name was the unusual one of Franeis. (It has been often mistakenly cited as
- Married: Rodker; AtkinThis name is also spelled in several different forms, including Aitken.
- Pseudonym: Mark DruryMark Drury. Her biographer Nathalie Blondel suggests that the name was inspired by that of her brother, .wrote early unpublished poems under the name