The Chicago-born socialite, suffragette and prolific author, Mary ‘May’ Borden (1886-1968) used her own private wealth to fund and staff a mobile hospital at the French front, for which she received the Croix de Guerre and was made a member of the Légion d'honneur. The Forbidden Zone is considered “her most enduring work,” comprising five stories “written recently from memory” and poems and sketches penned during her four years in France, and as Nicola Beauman observes, “written with a bleak realism that makes this one of the greatest of all wartime books by a woman.” (ODNB).