In many respects, Mary Butts’ work echoes that of John Cowper Powys. Both writers’ examination of place derives its central vitality from a grounding in the landscapes of Dorset (and also, in Powys’ case, Somerset); and both consciously deploy imaginative license in their recreations of those landscapes. However, while Powys’ playfully nostalgic landscapes deliberately resist exclusionary tendencies, Butts’ attempts to re-enchant the rural world by drawing upon myth and mysticism often become entangled with a more ideologically problematic position. Like that of Lawrence, Butts’ project is fundamentally ambivalent: both writers have a deep sense of attachment to an area identified as home, but a similarly strong desire to reinvent that area, motivated in part by antagonistic and stifling family relations. The aftermath of the First World War is also key to this sense of ambivalence, since for both writers the cultural and historical break it represents is seen simultaneously as a catastrophe, and an opportunity to reimagine the English landscape. As I argue in this chapter, such reimaginings, in Butts’ work, take complex forms: sometimes expressing a deracinated sensibility that reclaims rural England as a cosmopolitan zone in which marginalised socio-cultural groups can thrive; and typically emphasising the landscape's animistic qualities, its central role within a fictional project that often seeks to undermine boundaries between human and nonhuman life, the animate and inanimate. In such respects, the influence of modernity upon Butts’ distinctive vision of place – both in terms of the innovations of literary modernism, and her exposure to cosmopolitan and metropolitan experience – is clear. In her later work, however, Butts tends to foreclose the potential for her writing to celebrate liminality, marginality and cosmopolitanism: increasingly, rather than blurring or transgressing boundaries, she draws upon her sense of living ‘in two worlds at once’ to create imaginary cultural, temporal and geographical realms that are beyond the influences and developments of her period, accessible only to initiates.