"Penelope", undated

The collection is divided into two series: writings and correspondence. The bulk of the material is draft copies of unpublished plays, short stories and poetry penned by Mary Josephs prior to her marriage to Lawrence Hall Fowler. Included in the writings are drafts of the diary she kept about her experiences during World War I as a nurse. It is not clear if it was written at the time, or composed later from her letters home to her parents.

The correspondence covers 1917-1920, and focuses largely on Fowler's war experiences. As she noted in her diary in 1939, she had a sense that "I was seeing things experienced by only a few people, and must record them for posterity." Used in conjunction with her war diary, the letters vividly depict the hardships faced not only by medical workers, but the men in the trenches as well.