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. A sophisticated and most exquisitely written fantasy...Miss Butts is a poet and a writer of often distinguished prose. -- The New York Times Butts deserves to be ranked with Firbank, Mansfield, Lawrence, Richardson and Woolf among the most important English modernist fiction writers. -- Chicago Tribune The drama of the soul's conflict is boldly supported by her use of scenic background... A work of art. -- The Observer 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. Used Book in Good Condition