A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

The never-before-told tale of a single woman's bravery that altered the direction of World War II

"She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies," the Gestapo said in an urgent message sent out in 1942. She must be located and destroyed."

This spy was a young American woman named Virginia Hall. She was turned away from the foreign service due to her gender and prosthetic leg, but she managed to talk her way into the spy group that Churchill considered to be his "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare," and she was the first woman to deploy to occupied France even before the United States entered the war.

Despite being one of the best spies in American history, Virginia Hall's tale is yet unknown. As with Clementine, Sonia Purnell unearths the riveting tale of a formidable, important, and surprisingly underappreciated Second World War heroine. Virginia Hall became known as the "Madonna of the Resistance," organising a network of spies to blow up bridges, report on German troop movements, arrange equipment drops for Resistance agents, and recruit and train guerilla fighters, all during a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden. Virginia defied many orders to leave, even though her image appeared on wanted posters all throughout Europe. She finally escaped with her life in a grueling hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown, and her associates all imprisoned or executed. She jumped back in as soon as she could, however, organising soldiers to disrupt German lines and support Allied forces arriving on Normandy beaches because she was certain that she had "more lives to save." A Woman of No Importance tells the amazing tale of how a single woman's unwavering perseverance contributed to the victory in a war, with Purnell's characteristic humour and novelistic flair.