"Mary Butts wrote and lived among such notable modernist writers as T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau, H. D., and Ezra Pound and showed promise of becoming one of the most respected British female writers of the twentieth century. Yet, after her death in 1937 at the age of forty-six, her reputation suffered a decline because Butts's idiosyncratic spirituality did not lend itself to easy critical examination, modernism was generally considered a masculine endeavor, and her papers were not made public for over fifty years." "Mary Butts confronts and reinterprets reality in extraordinary ways, and her modernist vision recalls the natural origins and powers of the female divine. Her intense dedication to ancient rites and myth, and her dabbling in the occult became embedded in her fiction and led to her own brand of mysticism."--BOOK JACKET.