Armed with Madness, the first of the two “Taverner Novels” by the Dorset-born author Mary Butts (1890-1937), was published in 1928 by Wishart & Co. in the UK and A. & C. Boni in the US. The text, a formally innovative retelling of the Grail myth, charts the romantic, artistic, and psychological struggles of a clique of young bohemians living in rustic solitude in the southwest of England, “[Thomas] Hardy’s country” (AWM, pp. 10-11). The dramatic action pivots around the discovery of a peculiar trinket from a drought-shrunken well that may be, in the words of Butts’s admired contemporary Arthur Machen, “the glorious object of the greatest of all Legends&…
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Citation: Radford, Andrew. "Armed with Madness". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 July 2023 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39186, accessed 28 September 2023.]
