Mary Borden and Life Writing

When the Chicago heiress Mary Borden went to the Western Front as a nurse in 1915, this was only one dramatic episode in an extraordinary life. She is now best-known for her war memoir The Forbidden Zone (1929) but by her death in 1968, Borden, later Lady Spears, had published over twenty books, including novels, poems, autobiographies, self-help titles and film-scripts. She ran field hospitals in both the First and Second World Wars, and was later made a fellow of the Royal Literary Society. She was married twice: once to a missionary in India, and once to a British politician and diplomat. She also had a remarkable circle of contacts and friends, including Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein and Winston Churchill. Borden made extensive use of her own life experience in her writing both fictional and non-fictional. She was also a colourful letter-writer and essayist. This project engages with recent work in the field of life-writing to explore Borden’s navigation, and occasional violation, of the boundary between fact and fiction. Exploring her oeuvre as a whole, this project repositions Borden as a key figure in women’s writing in the mid-twentieth century.

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