Eliza Marian Butler, called Elsie by friends and published as E. M. Butler, was born in 1885 in Bardsea, Lancashire. Her schooling took her through Hanover and Paris before she came to Newnham College, Cambridge. She held the Henry Simon Chair of German at Manchester from 1936 to 1944, then became Schröder Professor of German at Cambridge in 1945. No woman had held either chair before her.
Butler wrote about literature the way a biographer would, more interested in the person behind a work than in formal analysis. She kept returning to two subjects: how German writers imagine themselves and their culture, and the long history of magic and the occult. Beyond scholarship she wrote two novels and a memoir, Paper Boats, published in 1959. Her stance often ran against received opinion, and she did not mind.
The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (1935) made her name. It is an early and sharp critique of German devotion to ancient Greece, and it provoked an angry response, especially in Germany, where translation was banned. Between 1948 and 1952 she published a trilogy on magic and the Faust legend: The Myth of the Magus, Ritual Magic and The Fortunes of Faust. She also wrote a study of Rilke and a biography of Heinrich Heine.
On WebToTell her name appears on the definitive edition of Kafka's The Trial. The text is the Muirs' translation, with additional material that Butler translated. Read it for Kafka. To meet Butler's own voice, begin with The Myth of the Magus, which follows the magician figure from Zoroaster and Solomon down to Cagliostro and Rasputin.
