Growing up in Edwardian England under the influence of a Victorian mother, Mary Butts underwent a struggle for identity that mirrored those of other young women of the period. In her review of Mark Perugini's Victorian Days and Ways, which appeared in The Bookman (May 1932), she wrote,

To many women I have known, "growing-up" in Edwardian England implied an agonised, ridiculous, exhausting, confusing, nerve-wrecking, complex-forming struggle for the right to grow into the kind of person that she was. . . . And it is a paradox of that extraordinary age, of which the girl's war was one of the death-throes, that it produced the greatest intellectual statement of women's rights to be human beings that the world has ever known. Yet it was not John Stuart Mill, but the European War that did the trick.

Rebelling against her mother, Butts made her own intellectual statement through her writing, one that...