Mary Borden

Mary Borden (May 15, 1886, Chicago – December 2, 1968) (married names: Mary Turner; Mary Spears, Lady Spears; pseud. Bridget Maclagan) was an Anglo-American novelist and poet whose work drew on her experiences as a war nurse. She was the second of the three children of William Borden (d. 1904), who had made a fortune in Colorado silver mining in the late 1870s. 2Family background and early life 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. 2World War I and nursing 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, see Voluntary Aid Detachmen