By the time Vichy France fell under occupation, “the limping lady of Lyon” had become the Nazis’ most wanted Allied agent in France.

Sonia Purnell’s excellent biography should help make that happen. But he was reluctant to speak of what he did. Though that hostility explains much about Hall's patchwork assignments in American intelligence, it also feels as if more personal insights are missing.

It’s sadly unsurprising that her postwar life, working for the C.I.A., was largely one of frustration: Her male colleagues felt threatened by her achievements, and she was frequently sidelined. But outdated sensitivities came to her aid. J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot is the producer on t…

Virginia Hall Goillot DSC, Croix de Guerre, MBE (April 6, 1906 – July 8, 1982), code named Marie and Diane, was an American who worked with the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in France during World War II. The story is clearly Hall's, and her achievements beggar belief, from escaping France through the Pyrenees (with Cuthbert intact) to the sixth sense that repeatedly kept her from capture.

In the years before World War II, Hall tried to break into the American Foreign Service but was denied due to her gender as well as a leg injury. But Sonia Purnell's A Woman of No Importance is a gripping take, tracing Hall's life in the context of hurdles she faced from allies — as much as from enemies. Though the minutiae of her missions are gripping, Hall shines through in every dispatch with human complexity; popular and lonely, patient and short-tempered, depressed and determined.

It would be easy to believe the Limping Lady wasn't real. [ Read: OSS veterans recall cloak-and-dagger days. ©2020 All Rights Reserved Copyright. Affiliate Disclosure: Evolve Media LLC, and its owned and operated websites may receive a small commission from the proceeds of any product(s) sold through affiliate and direct partner links. The Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E., had a remit to “set Europe ablaze,” and while Hall seemed an ideal candidate — as a neutral American, she could travel around France quite openly — many barriers remained, not least her sex. It was a hasty affair; the rush to get undertrained and unsupported operatives into the field led to fatal mistakes, and Hall was often aghast at the ways good-old-boy office politics seemed so often to triumph over on-the-ground realities. There were early signs of independent-mindedness — the young Virginia “once wore a bracelet of live snakes” to school, Purnell writes in her captivating new biography of Hall, “A Woman of No Importance” — but in early adulthood she submitted to her mother’s ambitions to mold her into a society girl. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Q&A with Sonia Purnell, author of A Woman of No Importance 1.
She eventually worked for British intelligence during the war and eventually was allowed to join the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. An adaptation of "A Woman of No Importance," based on author Sonia Purnell’s upcoming biography of American heiress/super-spy Virginia Hall. Lyon madam Germaine Guérin was harboring Jewish refugees and Allies before Virginia Hall ever got there, and stands out in the telling. But maybe this only feels like a loss because Hall is such a vivid presence elsewhere. But Hall persevered, helped by her ability to dish out “Homeric bollockings” when required, and plotted prison breakouts, organized resistance activities and re-established a chain of radio operatives throughout the region. But the nameless young lady in 1942 who got off a train and asked for black coffee and three aspirins at a cafe also saved lives — it was a signal to the locals the Gestapo was on to them. Her only available escape route, in mid-November, was across “one of the cruelest mountain passes in the Pyrenees,” frequently impassable even in summer.

Certainly, hers was a story that must have been muttered about on hillsides, in the dark, by warriors, for Hall emerged from a middle-class American background to become one of the greatest figures of World War II: “the Madonna of the Mountains,” a hero who helped liberate France. EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures has acquired the Sonia Purnell book A Woman Of No Importance, and has attached Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley to star.

A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II By Sonia Purnell “A Homeric tale” is how Sonia Purnell describes the life of Virginia Hall… WWII spy biography, 'A Woman of No Importance,' exposes Virginia Hall, a woman on a mission. Stakes are rarely an issue in a book about WWII; its rhythms are a shorthand, and we've come to expect hairy near-misses, unlikely escapes, and devastating double agents. Buy A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of Virginia Hall, WWII’s Most Dangerous Spy by Purnell, Sonia (ISBN: 9780349010182) from Amazon's Book Store. The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II. (Hall's first field name, "Germaine Lecontre," may be one of the less subtle spy monikers ever bestowed.). monitoring_string = "df292225381015080a5c6c04a6e2c2dc". But amid the SOE chaos, there's also the overarching sense of righteousness that accompanies World War II stories — fighting Nazis is one of the most clearly demarcated moral lines in history — and even a little gallows humor. It sounds like propaganda meant to misdirect WWII Germans: a lone foreigner running riot in occupied France, everywhere at once, unrecognizable despite a trademark gait, able to bewitch information out of anyone, single-handedly stirring up resistance — and then vanishing. “A Homeric tale” is how Sonia Purnell describes the life of Virginia Hall, and that sounds about right.

David Holahan. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. The primary enemy here was the mundane tyranny of sexism that stymied her career (a man in the department referred to her as a "gung-ho lady left over from OSS days overseas" only a few years after the war), and Purnell tracks the infuriating infighting between pro- and anti-Hall factions with the same seriousness as the French campaigns; there's more than one kind of war. [ Virginia Hall is featured at New York’s espionage museum, Spyscape. How? Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon. What sounds almost like high jinks took extraordinary courage and resourcefulness, and its contribution to the invasion can’t be overestimated. And yet the prosthetic replacement she dubbed “Cuthbert” didn’t prevent her from becoming an ambulance driver in France when the war broke out; nor slow her down when a chance encounter put her in touch with the man setting up a new British secret service.

But the speedy Nazi takeover of Europe was more alarming than the usual prejudices, and in 1940 she was in France with only the barest brief — build a Resistance, no matter what. Rebooting the entire network, Hall found that not all of her problems originated with the enemy. She was an unlikely choice for SOE field work; she was a woman, she was American, and she had a disability (a hunting accident left her with a wooden leg she called Cuthbert) that made her easy to identify. ]. Purnell's picture of a postwar world is a fractured, ethically muddy arena of conflicting operations, and we're left without much sense of what Hall thought of those assignments — some of which pitted her against factions she'd worked with during the war. Hall's war motivations were clear; she felt the horror of Nazi and Vichy cruelty and was determined to help.

I had never heard of Virginia Hall before the release of Sonia Purnell’s biography A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II. “Traditionally,” Purnell notes, “British secret services had drawn from a shallow gene of posh boys raised on imperial adventure stories” (much like the British acting profession today), and many new recruits backed away in horror on learning that they were essentially expected to become assassins. If Virginia Hall herself remains something of an enigma — a testament, perhaps, to the skills that allowed her to live in the shadows for so long — the extraordinary facts of her life are brought onto the page here with a well-judged balance of empathy and fine detail. We Insist: A Timeline Of Protest Music In 2020. Virginia Hall was one of the earliest Special Operations Executive agents Britain sent into occupied France to stir up resistance against the Nazi/Vichy regime, where she laid critical groundwork for an organized Resistance in southern France — and later led a cell herself. This book is as riveting as any thriller, and as hard to put down.

How did you come to write about Virginia Hall – an incredible but unsung hero of the Second World War? (Perhaps literally: Purnell notes "[w]hole batches of papers at the National Archives and Records Administration...have apparently been mislaid".) A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II By Sonia Purnell. ComingSoon.net is a property of Mandatory, an Evolve Media, LLC company. It’s a surprise, too, to learn quite how much money was involved in persuading people to fight for their freedom. And though the international stakes shrink sharply, the air of menace follows Hall after the war into the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and, eventually, the CIA. Other resistance leaders proved intransigent or reckless, fellow operatives were too insecure to take orders from a woman and Benzedrine-enhanced libido resulted in male agents cutting a swath through the female population. WWII Spy Virginia Hall, The Subject Of Sonia Purnell's 'A Woman Of No Importance,' Was Anything But A very smooth read about a rocky life, Sonia Purnell's biography of … That whispered-about legend she became during the war years in occupied France deserves to be loudly celebrated now. With typical sang-froid, her midescape transmission to London read, “Cuthbert is being tiresome, but I can cope.” The duty officer who received it, not understanding the reference, suggested that she “have him eliminated.”. And though Hall's impact is astonishing, the book makes clear how many people a Resistance requires. The Coolheaded, One-Legged Spy Who Changed the Course of World War II, Read: OSS veterans recall cloak-and-dagger days. Special to USA TODAY. Brief experiences at Radcliffe and Barnard proved enough, however, and soon Hall was in Europe, enduring a succession of disappointing jobs at embassies and losing her left leg in a hunting accident. She isn't totally unknown; there have been other biographies, as well as a CIA training hall named in her honor and even a Drunk History sketch. agents being rounded up by the Vichy police. A very smooth read about a rocky life, A Woman of No Importance is a compelling biography of a masterful spy, and a reminder of what can be done with a few brave people — and a little resistance.
But Purnell smooths a staggering cast and timeline into a brisk narrative. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Having witnessed early gatherings of National Socialists in Vienna, Hall had fewer qualms, and found herself in Vichy-controlled Lyon shortly before careless tradecraft led to local S.O.E. Virginia Hall would be okay with her anonymity since she never sought fame or recompense. She returned to France a few months later, having signed up with the newly formed O.S.S., and directed resistance operations at the time of the Normandy landings: Under her command, saboteurs put up misleading road signs to direct troops the wrong way (and “preferably over a precipice”), and laid explosive horse dung on roads. Virginia Hall … Still, Purnell finds fresh dread in the growing efficacy of surveillance, the Vichy regime's tactics, and propaganda campaigns where "the same false messages were pressed home again and again until they were almost universally believed, even when flying in the face of incontrovertible facts.".

The Second World War is a period of history that has always drawn me in, perhaps because my late father fought in the war.

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