A Nurse in the Great War: The Exceptional Voice of Mary Borden

Abstract

This essay focuses on the experience and literary testimony of Mary Borden, an outstanding figure in the landscape of World War I nursing. Beyond gender issues or questions of traumatic writing, what emerges out of Borden’s disjointed sketches is a phenomenology of the exceptional experience of war. Borden’s war writing sets itself at odds with cultural and aesthetic norms, challenging not only the model of the idealised, sanctified nurse figure, but the aesthetic expectations of nurses’ accounts.

Keywords

• negativity
• phenomenology
• space
• war
• war nursing
• World War I