SOURCE: A review of Ashe of Rings, in The Calendar of Modern Letters, March 1925-July 1927, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1966, pp. 476-78.

In the following review, Muir finds Ashe of Rings inconsistent and overly conventional, although he concedes that Butts has the potential to be a talented writer.

Miss Butts is a short-story writer of ability; in Ashe of Rings, she essays the novel with much the same technique as she used for the short story. This raises the question of technique. A short digression is, therefore, necessary.

By technique is generally meant the various means which a writer uses to express his vision. As such it is in every period a collective as well as an individual thing; the expression on the one hand, of what people call the spirit of the age, and, on the other, of the personality of the writer. And as in the political...