Abstract
This chapter argues that Mary Butts’s posthumously published memoir, The Crystal Cabinet (1939), is replete with objects that speak of affective and spiritual realities. Butts’s animistic understanding resonates with romantic modernism, pagan pantheism and incarnational theology as she finds the divine within the material things and the landscape around her. Anderson addresses the text’s syncretism as Butts seeks to unify her recent commitment to Anglo-Catholicism with the paganism that had always enchanted her. In The Crystal Cabinet, the author’s childhood relationships with things become a way of exploring challenging questions surrounding creativity, the relationship between objects and landscape, divine life and the spiritual resonance of the object world.
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Anderson, E. (2016). Childish Things: Spirituality, Materiality and Creativity in Mary Butts’s The Crystal Cabinet . In: Anderson, E., Radford, A., Walton, H. (eds) Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_8
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