'Mary Borden, ..... was the daughter of a prominent Chicago millionaire. Her childhood was overshadowed by her mother’s conversion to an extreme form of evangelicalism and May escaped her influence as soon as she was old enough, setting off on a world tour. In India she met her first husband and settled there, raising her two daughters. This life proved equally claustrophobic and in 1913 she moved her family to London where she was soon a part of the literary circle, socialising with writers such as Ford Madox Ford, E.M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound and falling for the charms of the painter Wyndham Lewis, becoming his patron and lover.
'At the outbreak of WW1, she used her substantial inheritance to fund a front line mobile hospital for the French Army, earning medals for her bravery under fire and going on to run the biggest military hospital during the battle of the Somme. She met the love of her life, Captain Edward Louis Spears, during the war and together they set up home in Paris, keeping open house throughout the Peace Conference for an eclectic mix of writers, poets, artists and politicians. Their affair, and subsequent marriage, provoked a particularly unpleasant custody battle over May’s three daughters, and their kidnapping by their father. May’s second marriage endured for 50 years, in spite of Louis’s affair with his secretary that lasted almost as long as his marriage.
'During the interwar years May wrote prolifically, becoming an international, best-selling author, with close literary friends such as Noel Coward, Freya Stark and Cyril Connolly. Her rebellious and questioning nature meant her novels were often boundary breaking and controversial. She made films with Alexander Korda at the height of his fame - though their first collaboration was shelved due to the censorship of its subject matter - and she became embroiled in a legal suit with the Catholic Herald for her down to earth portrayal of Mary of Nazareth. Another book advocating divorce and pre-marital sex also caused a storm of protest. She helped her husband on the campaign trail when he stood for parliament, giving speeches and descending deep into the mines in his constituency to canvas the workers. She was an outspoken critic of the government when she did not agree with policy and campaigned for women’s rights and other causes, as well as arguing vehemently against the policy of appeasement.
'Throughout WW2 she ran mobile hospitals at the front and had a terrifying escape from France during its fall. Back in England she became involved with the Free French under de Gaulle and took a newly established unit to the Middle East. As well as running her unit, she had to fulfil her duties as wife of the first minister in the Levant where she played hostess to the key figures of the war.
'After the war, she continued writing, publishing her last novel at the age of 70. She often returned to the country of her birth and helped her nephew-in-law, Adlai Stevenson, run for presidency, writing some of his speeches. She was also a guest of Albert Einstein’s at his home in Princeton where they debated, among other things, the existence of God. Until the end of her life in 1968, Mary was a high-profile public figure who supported young writers and artists and campaigned tirelessly for her various causes.'
The website http://www.maryborden.com contains lots of information. Everything except a critical treatment of the books Mary Borden wrote. So we mention this--- The Hungry Leopard (London: Heinemann, 1956).
From what I think is jacket copy:
THE HUNGRY LEOPARD
BY MARY BORDEN
'Mary Borden, storyteller extraordinary, unfolds the story of Amanda,
and of the five brooding London days during which her life hangs in the balance. At this time all the people concerned with her behave characteristically, but with heightened
awareness of life and love, loneliness and death. There is Gilbert,
beautiful of face and manner, vacant of soul, and doing as well at the Foreign Office as he had been eighteen years before when Amanda married him and left him in America; the Honorable Eloise Hunt, aristocratic playgirl whose life is at the mercy of her
instincts; Arnold Bonnibrook, who has the unbelievably bad taste to be the
head of a publishing house and completely devoted to literature at the
same time; Sophie, his wife and Amanda's confident. Then, there is
aged Harriet Bonnibrook, who in the end holds in her elegant fingers the
one piece of the puzzle that all of them seek.'
In an excerpt from The Hungry Leopard we quote the heroine, reminiscing:
'That winter had been hell. Such unmitigated hell that she remembered going at her fences like a maniac, and hoping she would break her neck each time she followed hounds. But
it was Starlight who had paid for her black rage with the world. The memory made her sick. She had never maltreated a horse before in her life. Cruel to an animal because a man had let her down and she had no one to sleep with? Something like that. And what a lovely creature she had been, that mare; dainty and nervous as a cat, a mouth like silk, and the heart of a lion. She would never forget the look in the beast's eyes as she lay on the ground. She would have sailed over the wire like a bird if she hadn't already been ridden to death, and she knew it. They both knew it.'
Let's assume this is fictionalized, and that the prose explains the neglect of her fiction. Her memoirs were well received, especially The Forbidden Zone (London: Heinemann, 1929). And there is a biography, Mary Borden: A Woman of Two Wars
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