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.

[6] Notably, her work includes a striking set of sketches and short stories, The Forbidden Zone (1929), which 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.

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.

"[8]The Forbidden Zone is a fictionalised and experimental memoir which mixes prose and poetry to give an account of Borden's experience during the war.

She describes the men and women of the war as displaced inhabitants of a strange, hallucinated world where people are reduced to bodies and functions.

Journey Down a Blind Alley, published on her return to Paris in 1946, records the history of the unit, and her disillusion with the perceived failure of the French to put up effective resistance to the German invasion and occupation.

[15] A first-person account of Lady Spears and the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit can be found in the memoirs of Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, To War with Whitaker.

[16] In her later life, she often returned to the United States and assisted her nephew-in-law Adlai Stevenson II in his run for the presidency, even writing some of his speeches.

This saw the moat filled with thousands of tiny flames and a soundscape composed by Mira Calix which is a choral setting of one of Borden's love sonnets[19] written at the Somme for Louis Spears.