She establishes safe houses and hidden transmitter sites for reporting to London, always mindful of the truck-borne radio-frequency detectors trolling the streets.Īnd she manages this wide-ranging espionage enterprise even as she leads nighttime ambushes and sabotage raids. She channels millions of British-counterfeited francs into her network for bribes and agent expenses. She also recruits local women as couriers and enlists sympathetic prostitutes as spies and informers. There, she builds a network of informants, a number of them Vichy police and bureaucrats, and sets up safe exfiltration routes for SOE agents through Marseille, 200 miles to the south. Undaunted and determined to resist the Nazi onslaught, Hall signs on as an ambulance driver for the French army, where she comes to the attention of a talent-spotter for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a new organization geared to sabotage and subversion.Īs France totters, the SOE dispatches Hall under journalistic cover to Lyon, deep in collaborationist territory. In 1939, after another rejection for a diplomatic position, she leaves U.S. embassy in Turkey, where her accident occurs. She settles for a clerical position (the standard assignment for a female applicant at the time) at the U.S. After grad school in Paris, she applies for the diplomatic service and is declined. Ten years before going undercover in France, she loses her leg in a hunting accident while serving as a State Department clerk in Turkey.īaltimore-born Hall hails from a prominent banking family. All along, she defies gender-role obstacles deployed by intransigent and often bumbling male opposition, much of it officers who outrank her.īut here’s the real stunner in this bold and fearless woman’s saga, a factor that might have deterred (or disqualified) a less-determined individual: Hall’s right leg is missing below the knee.

Author Sonia Purnell has turned out a thoroughly gripping and inspiring account bristling with real-life suspense of an American’s unlikely role in the struggle against Hitler’s occupying forces.Įxpert in evasion, close combat, and disguise, Hall repeatedly eludes her pursuers - Gestapo and Vichy collaborators alike - from 1940 through the Nazi retreat from France in early 1945. A Woman of No Importance chronicles the remarkable life of Virginia Hall, a decorated behind-the-lines operative for the Allies in Vichy France in WWII.

A woman of no importance author