Taverner Novels

Mary Butt died prematurely in 1937 after an unsuccessful surgery at age 46 but is regarded as a modernist master for her novels "Armed with Madness'' (1928) and "Death of Felicity Taverner" (1932), both of which are now in the public domain and somewhat neglected but deserving of re-discovery and very high literary esteem. "Armed With Madness" is a variation on the grail myth, concerned with ritualism and the relationships of a group of young bohemians living in rural isolation on the south-west coast of England, it is recognized as Mary Butts's most significant contribution to literary modernism, and has been called a "masterpiece of Modernist prose". In this story a group of youthful but disillusioned characters who live a bohemian existence go off on a strange quest when an ancient chalice is found at the bottom of a well. The discovery of the chalice ignites a fury of conflicting emotion, and propels them on an adventure of mythic proportion-a virtual re-enactment of the Grail Quest. Five friends are staying at a remote cottage in the Cornish countryside, where they're joined by an American. While helping clean out a local well, the six discover an ancient cup buried within. This cup seems to have a long and mysterious history-could it even be the fabled Holy Grail? Investigating the cup's identity soon ignites simmering tensions among the group of uneasy "friends" as their personalities, desires, fears, and hopes begin to clash. In "Death of Felicity Taverner," the quest of "Armed With Madness" is renewed five years later, 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.