November 2021 Book, A Woman of No Importance

 

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. Contact the library to request a copy of this or any of our past monthly selections.

To WWII Germans, it sounded like propaganda meant to misdirect: 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.

The German secret police couldn't even be sure what country she was from. It would be easy to believe the Limping Lady wasn't real.

But she was.

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. There have been other biographies, 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.

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. 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.

NPR book review, 4/2019

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