A ‘Fine, Mysterious, Almost Sacred Fable’? Retelling the Grail Quest in Mary Butts’Armed with Madness

Abstract

This article scrutinises the critically overlooked interwar fiction of the British novelist Mary Franeis Butts (1890–1937). While textual scholars have canvassed her persistent flirtation with strains of anti-equalitarian harangue, comparatively little attention is paid to her literary–religious formulations, especially her ‘science of mysticism’, and her energetically eccentric approach to Grail lore. Her second published novel Armed with Madness (1928) situates the ‘Sanc Grail’ as the centrepiece of a dissident mythic vision in which troublingly violent encounters play out against an animistic backdrop of pre-Christian survivals. For Butts, the modern-day Grail Quest offers scant solace to pilgrims wishing to excavate the historic conditions of faith; rather it involves an experience of cleansing discomfort that reflects an age of post-war civic ferment.