The Taverner Novels: Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner (Recovered Classic Series) - Softcover

Butts, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0929701186 ISBN 13: 9780929701189

Publisher: McPherson & Co, 1992

Synopsis

These two novels, Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner–out of print since originally published in 1928 and 1932–form what is almost certainly her masterpiece, a mythic yet contemporary tale of struggle against spiritual alienation.

On the remote southwestern coast along the English Channel, a group of young bohemians have gathered, in retreat from the psychological cataclysm of World War and in search of a moral value on which to base their lives. Armed with Madness begins by invoking an ancient enchantment, a numinous vision of coincident reality, where love can also lead to insanity. Scylla Taverner, her brother Felix, her soon-to-be lover Picus, and their closely knit circle of English, Russian and American friends, retrieve an ancient chalice, which may be the Sanc-Grail. Together they enter upon a psychological and sexual exploration fraught with exhilarating possibility and violent consequence.

Five years later, in Death of Felicity Taverner the quest is renewed, this time to discover a buried truth. Was Felicity’s death accidental? A suicide? Or a murder? As the mystery unravels, Felicity’s opportunistic widower unveils a plan with a vacation-home development, inciting a drama played out between conscience and evil.

About this title

About the Author

She drank with Hemingway at Les Deux Magots; Virgil Thompson courted her; among her best friends she counted H.D. and Bryher and corresponded at length with Charles Williams, but Virginia Woolf hated her perfume. She lived more outrageously than Jean Rhys and was considered a better writer than Katherine Mansfield. She was published in Ford Madox Ford's Transatlantic Review and Ezra Pound's Little Review; Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions issued her first novel. ... And yet, though hailed in her time for adventurous originality, because of her untimely death her greatest works have remained lost for sixty years. Fortunately, the flame of Mary Butts (1890-1937) has been kept alive over time by Kenneth Rexroth, Virgil Thomson, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Irby, Gerrit Lansing, Robert Kelly and many others.

Edition details

• Publisher: McPherson & Co
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0929701186
• ISBN 13: 9780929701189
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 374