Unborn Gods

Written in 1915 and never published, this daring if uneven novel by Armed with Madness author Butts (1890–1937) explores a woman’s sexual desire in Edwardian London. Agnes Helen Ormonde flouts convention, carrying on an affair with a married professor and courting the affection of a girl philosophy student. On a voyage to Australia to visit her brother, she embraces the lifestyle of a courtesan and returns to England as a thoroughly “fallen woman,” unable to find a husband and only attracting interest from a man looking for a “feminine distraction.” Her success with men is prodigious (one admirer describes her as a “miracle of a woman”), but she is less likely to conquer the heart of the reader. Initially, Butts casts Agnes as intriguingly enigmatic, but by the farcical third act she’s been flattened into a villain, “absorbed in her own greed” and frequently compared by the author to a snake. Still, the sharp prose and the audacity of the plot offer early signs of Butts’s later brilliance. For modernist fiction fans, this is worth a look. (Mar.)