Review of 'Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism', by Andrew Radford, TLS

Mary Butts needs to be reinstated in the modernist canon, but this is not the dominating concern of Andrew Radford’s book on this recondite figure.  Radford’s neo-Romantic lens is the shaping force of this study, as the subject of the opening chapter makes abundantly clear.  Before addressing the critical handling and neglect of Butts (in the second chapter), Radford first confronts the neo-Romantic movement, examining the ways in which its various proponents reimagined and remodelled the landscape of Romanticism. 

As well as adding some much needed momentum to the so far languid attempt to establish the importance of Butts, this study contributes to the recent project (advanced by Alexandra Harris in Romantic Moderns) that aims to legitimise the romantic strain of modernism.  The combination of Butts’s oeuvre and Radford’s neo-Romantic lens allows for a kaleidoscopic insight into various concerns, influences, and aesthetic modes.  The study is as dense as it is sprawling.  Whilst the amorphousness of neo-Romanticism is carefully observed, Radford’s reading of Butts draws certain aspects of the movement and its milieu into sharper relief.  

Her mysticism is illuminated with reference to Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mark on the Wall’.   Both authors suffuse the concrete with a sense of something more; ‘the otherworldly [is] enfolded within the everyday’.  But whilst this focus aligns with recent criticism that probes the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of modernist writing (like Suzanne Hobson’s Angels of Modernism), Radford seems reluctant to define the exact terms of Butts’s metaphysical preoccupation.  Discussion ranges seamlessly and somewhat indiscriminately across mysticism, magic, the paranormal, the psychic, the ineffable, the unseen, the ‘sheer force that lies behind’, with little attempt to isolate or unpack the significance of each of these abstractions.  But perhaps the nebulousness of Butts’ own otherworldly vision demands to be treated in this shifting, indefinite way?

Butts and Neo-Romanticism paints a rich picture of the cultural matrix that influenced, and was influenced by both author and movement.  Focusing on her archaeological interest, her trenchant contempt for the ‘sightseeing ramblers’ invading the countryside, and her belief in the ‘inbred genetic superiority’ of some over others, Radford offers penetrating glances into a variety of traditions and figures, including (though not limited to) artists like Paul Nash and John Piper; her romantic forbears: Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth; William Blake (who was close friends with Butts’s own great-grandfather); as well as her contentious relationship with Bloomsbury.  Offering fresh insight into even the most contentious of Butts’s views, Radford’s neo-Romantic lens proves an incredibly comprehensive vista for newly regarding this curiously neglected author.