Mary Borden

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Mary Borden (1886-1968) an early 20th century, Anglo-American novelist. She was born into a wealthy Chicago family. She was living in England in 1914 at the outbreak of the war and used her own money to equip and staff a field hospital close to the Front in which she herself served as a nurse from 1914 till the end of the war. It was there she met Brigadier General Edward Louis Spears, whom she married in 1918 following the dissolution of her marriage to George Douglas Turner. Despite her considerable social commitments as the wife of a prominent diplomat, she continued a successful career as a writer. 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 this work coming from a woman's pen. Living in England between the wars, she was drawn back to France in the expectation of mounting some sort of aid facility similar to that she had run in the first war. But France rapidly fell and her services were not required. Journey Down a Blind Alley, published on her return to Paris in 1946, records her disillusion with the French failure to put up an effective resistance to the German invasion and occupation.

[edit] Works

• Three Pilgrims and a Tinker (1924)
• Flamingo (1927)
• The Forbidden Zone (1929) [OCLC: 1852756]
• Jehovah's Day (1929)
• A Woman with White Eyes (1930)
• Sarah Gay (1931)
• Journey Down a Blind Alley (1946)

[edit] References

• Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers, 56. 
• Obituaries: Miss Mary Borden Writer and head of hospital unit. The Times, 3 December 1968 (p10, Issue 57424)

This article incorporates text from The Modern World Encyclopædia: Illustrated (1935); out of UK copyright as of 2005.