A review by micheleamar
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell

4.0

Four thousand miles away in France, the old boys from the Haute-Loire Resistance wrote to each other to share the devastating news. They had enjoyed nearly forty years of freedom since spending a mere couple of months in Virginia's presence in 1944. But the warrior they called La Madone had shown them hope, comradeship, courage, and the way to be the best version of themselves, and they had never forgotten. In the midst of hardship and fear, she had shared with them a fleeting but glorious state of happiness and the most vivid moment of their lives. The last of those famous Diane Irregulars—the ever-boyish Gabriel Eyraud, her chouchou—passed away in 2017 while I was researching Virginia's story. Until the end of his days, he and the others who had known Virginia on the plateau liked to pause now and then to think of the woman in khaki who never, ever gave up on freedom. When they talked with awe and affection of her incredible exploits, they smiled and looked up at the wide, open skies with les étoiles dans les yeux.

It's absolutely insane to me that Virginia Hall's story isn't a widely-taught facet of history. There isn't a single bit of her life that was dull—it genuinely reads like a novel because of how much she went through, how much she sacrificed, and how much she accomplished. With a prosthetic leg, in the middle of a war, going undercover as a journalist, through disguises and prison breakouts and betrayals from double agents, considered by the Germans to be the most dangerous of all Allied spies, and I stumbled upon her biography by accident a couple years ago by happenstance? There's genuinely no reason why her story shouldn't be more widely known and I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about one of the unsung heroes of World War II.