Butts was born in Parkstone in Dorset in 1890 to a retired army officer and his much younger wife. The family house, Salterns, and the countryside surrounding it gave her childhood a magical sense of place to which her writings return. Thanks to her father and the Butts lineage, in which she took much pride, her childhood was also “saturated with the arts”, as she put it in her autobiographical memoir, The Crystal Cabinet (1937). Her great-grandfather, Thomas Butts, had been a patron and friend of William Blake, whose pictures filled a room of the house (the title of her memoir is from a poem by Blake). The death of her father when she was fourteen (as if “a strong, small, gold sun had set”) left her and her four-year-old brother Tony in the hands of their mother, towards whom Butts felt little more than hatred, regarding her as the representative of a middle-class philistinism, incapable of anything other than a commercial response to the land and the art that Mary loved (her mother sold both Salterns and the Blakes). She was sent to finish her education at a school in St Andrews in Scotland and from there went on to Westfield College, London. At Westfield, she studied Latin and Greek, rebelled against conventions, wrote Sapphic poetry and was described by the Principal as a “mad idiot” (the Dostoievskian ring of that would have pleased her). Required to leave when it was discovered that she and a Westfield mistress for whom she had a passion had gone off to the Derby together, she enrolled in social studies courses at the London School of Economics and at the start of the war began working in the East End for the London County Council and then for the National Council of Civil Liberties, particularly concerned at the time with the rights of conscientious objectors. In the last years of the war she was torn between two lovers: Eleanor Rogers, with whom she lived and about whom little is known, and John Rodker, a poet and publisher, imprisoned as a conscientious objector, whom she married in 1918. The couple had a daughter, Camilla, who was left in the care of others, and Butts, who died when her daughter was sixteen, rarely saw her (“motherhood was not Mary Butts’s forte”, as Camilla was to comment). In 1920 she left Rodker for Cecil Maitland, a writer badly affected by his war experiences, and lived with him, mainly in Paris, until their separation in 1925. In France, and indeed throughout her adult life, which was lived to the full with a restless bohemian lawlessness, Butts was a heavy consumer of alcohol, cocaine, heroin, opium and anything else available (in her final years in Cornwall she brewed up poppy heads and knocked back generous quantities of “Champagne Wine Nerve Tonic”, a potent stimulant discovered in a local shop). What relations she had with her mother were bitter, turning largely on matters of money and the Butts inheritance, and those with her brother became equally strained (Tony in 1932 was assuring Virginia Woolf that Mary was a pretentious bad woman: a corrupter of young men who “are always committing suicide”).
