Author: Borden, Mary [1886 - 1968]
Title: The FORBIDDEN ZONE
Description: Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc, 1930. 1st US edition. Black cloth binding with gilt stamped lettering. Blue topstain. Dust jacket. [12], 211, [3 (blank)] pp. Frontispiece, on coated paper, of Percy Smith's 1916 drypoint image, "Solitude", of Thiepval, near the Somme. 8vo. Square & tight, a VG+ book in a similar, price-clipped jacket. "Just behind the trenches in that forbidden zone where the front line hospitals were crowded with the dying the mutilated and the maimed, Mary Borden served as a war nurse." [front flap]. From a wealthy Chicago family, Borden, at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, used her own considerable money to equip and staff a field hospital for French soldiers close to the Western Front in which she served as a nurse from 1914 until the end of the war." This work is a fictionalised and experimental memoir which mixes prose and poetry to give an account of Borden's experience during the war, which includes a striking set of sketches and short stories, and "was published in the same year as A Farewell to Arms, Good-Bye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front but seems more akin to the modernist writings of her contemporaries Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein or Edith Sitwell. Like many writers of the time, Borden reached for new techniques and forms to describe the unprecedented scale and impact of a global conflict. Contemporary readers were disturbed by the graphic – sometimes hallucinatory – quality of her work, coming as it did from a woman with first-hand experience of life on the front line. A present-day editor of her work, Paul O'Prey, contends that Borden is 'the great forgotten voice of the war – the outstanding female voice of the first world war. Her poetry can stand alongside anything.' The Forbidden Zone contains five long poems that describe what she saw and did working in the military hospital, which are full of passionate energy and compassion. O'Prey finds them reminiscent of Walt Whitman who also tended to the wounded on the battlefield, in his case during the American Civil War." [Wiki].

Keywords: World War I Nursing


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