Mary Butts (British, 1890 - 1937) was a writer who lived and wrote among notable modernist authors such as T.S. Eliot, Jean Cocteau, and Ezra Pound. After living and studying in London prior to World War I, Butts spent the majority of the 1920s in Paris, where she became acquainted with avant-garde artists and writers, such as Cedric Morris and Jean Cocteau, who illustrated her 1928 novel Imaginary Letters. It was likely through Cocteau that Butts sat for Man Ray and had her portrait taken. After an early death in 1937 at age forty-six, her work and reputation suffered a decline, with her idiosyncratic prose and spiritual beliefs falling out of critical discourse until a re-examination of her diaries and writing beginning in the 1980s.