The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Ashe of Rings and Other Writings by Mary Butts
Allen Hibbard

Mary Butts. Ashe of Rings and Other Writings. Preface by Nathalie Blondel. McPherson, 1998. 365 pp. $24.00.

This volume containing works long out of print, along with Nathalie Blondel’s biography (reviewed by Irving Malin in the fall 1998 issue of RCF), prepares the way for a reassessment of Mary Butts’s place in modern British literature. Portions of Ashe of Rings are set against the backdrop of World War II and the novel, written in 1918-19, should be viewed alongside Forster’s Howard’s End (1910), Ford’s The Good Soldier (1914), Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Butts’s voice is distinctive, her language innovative. Her characters (Anthony, Melitta, Vanna and Valentine Ashe; Judy Marston; the Russian artist Serge Fyodorovitch; and soldier Peter Amburton) are caught in a net of competition, personal struggle, and jealousy. Creative instincts clash with destructive impulses. Supernatural, mystical forces lie just below the surface, centered around the Rings, a prehistoric site near the Ashe family estate, a sacred place where we feel supernatural events once occurred and could again transpire.

The remaining shorter pieces elucidate the ideas and beliefs informing Ashe of Rings. Composed in Paris seven years after the Bolshevik Revolution, “Imaginary Letters” are written to the mother of a Russian homosexual exile named Boris by a young woman who had tried to care for and connect with her son. “Warning to Hikers” and “Traps for Unbelievers,” essays published in 1932, respond to familiar modernist concerns. The first decries the loss of our ability to perceive beauty, the psychic disruption caused by urbanization, the myth of equality, and the contamination of nature by indifferent hikers from the cities; the second addresses our attempt to get along without religion, suggesting, it seems, a return to more primitive spiritual origins. “Ghosties and Ghoulies” is an overview of how the supernatural has been treated in literature. “We have been careless lately what spiritual company we have kept; in our choice of ghostly guests,” Butts concludes. [Allen Hibbard]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Ashe of Rings and Other Writings by Mary Butts Allen Hibbard Mary Butts. Ashe of Rings and Other Writings. Preface by Nathalie Blondel. McPherson, 1998. 365 pp. $24.00. This volume containing works long out of print, along with Nathalie Blondel’s biography (reviewed by Irving Malin in the fall 1998 issue of RCF), prepares the way for a reassessment of Mary Butts’s place in modern British literature. Portions of Ashe of Rings are set against the backdrop of World War II and the novel, written in 1918-19, should be viewed alongside Forster’s Howard’s End (1910), Ford’s The Good Soldier (1914), Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Butts’s voice is distinctive, her language innovative. Her characters (Anthony, Melitta, Vanna and Valentine Ashe; Judy Marston; the Russian artist Serge Fyodorovitch; and soldier Peter Amburton) are caught in a net of competition, personal struggle, and jealousy. Creative instincts clash with destructive impulses. Supernatural, mystical forces lie just below the surface, centered around the Rings, a prehistoric site near the Ashe family estate, a sacred place where we feel supernatural events once occurred and could again transpire. The remaining shorter pieces elucidate the ideas and beliefs informing Ashe of Rings. Composed in Paris seven years after the Bolshevik Revolution, “Imaginary Letters” are written to the mother of a Russian homosexual exile named Boris by a young woman who had tried to care for and connect with her son. “Warning to Hikers” and “Traps for Unbelievers,” essays published in 1932, respond to familiar modernist concerns. The first decries the loss of our ability to perceive beauty, the psychic disruption caused by urbanization, the myth of equality, and the contamination of nature by indifferent hikers from the cities; the second addresses our attempt to get along without religion, suggesting, it seems, a return to more primitive spiritual origins. “Ghosties and Ghoulies” is an overview of how the supernatural has been treated in literature. “We have been careless lately what spiritual company we have kept; in our choice of ghostly guests,” Butts concludes. [Allen Hibbard]

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