Mary Borden

Mary Borden (May 15, 1886 – December 2, 1968) was an early 20th-century, Anglo-American novelist and poet.

Mary Borden—known as May to her friends and family—was born into a wealthy Chicago family. (Her brother, William Whiting Borden, became well-known in conservative Christian circles for his evangelistic zeal and early death while preparing to become a missionary.) Mary attended Vassar College, graduating with a BA in 1907. On a tour of the Far East she met and married Scottish missionary George Douglas Turner, with whom she had three daughters; Joyce (born 1909), Comfort (born 1910) and Mary (born 1914).

In 1913 she and Turner moved to England where Borden joined the Suffragette movement. She was arrested during a demonstration in Parliament Square for throwing a stone through the window of Her Majesty's Treasury. She spent five days in police cells until bailed by her husband.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 she used her own considerable money to equip and staff a field hospital for French soldiers close to the Front in which she herself served as a nurse from 1914 until the end of the war. There she met Brigadier General Edward Louis Spears, with whom she engaged in an affair at the Front. Her husband separated from her and took custody of their children. Following the dissolution of her marriage, she married Spears in 1918.

During her war-time experience she wrote poetry such as 'The Song of the Mud' (1917). Notably, her work includes a striking set of sketches and short stories, The Forbidden Zone (1929), which was published in the same year as A Farewell to Arms, Good-Bye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front. Even in this context, contemporary readers were disturbed at the graphic - sometimes hallucinatory - quality of work coming from a woman who had first-hand experience of life on the front line.

The Forbidden Zone contained five long poems that describe what she saw and did working in the military hospital, and are full of passionate energy and compassion. Their style is reminiscent of Walt Whitman who also tended to the wounded on the battlefield, in his case during the American Civil War.

...
Wikipedia