The Taverner Novels by Mary Butts

With her work largely forgotten or overlooked for 90 years, it is time we shift our gaze to Butts. Almost immediately in The Taverner Novels, Butts establishes an off-kilter feeling. She begins by describing the setting/landscape, and after a few pages you no longer trust the trees, the wind, or the ocean. There is something strange at work, as a group of people (brother and sister (Scylla and Felix), friends (Clarence, Boris, Ross), lovers (Picus), and an outsider (Carston)) gather together in this remote house in rural England, but the eeriness is balanced by beauty, and this pendulum is what drives the author’s style (e.g., “Like open fir-cones dipped in fire and cream, the thunder-clouds were piling up the sky. Mounting the hills, a wing of them rising out of the sea. Inshore, a breath of wind clashed the pine needles.” (37)).