A Woman of no Importance

A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell

A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell is one of the best biographies I have ever read. It tells the story of, as it says on the cover, WWII's most dangerous spy. I found this book and the bright red cover and image of a woman, both mysterious and deeply intriguing. I wasn’t disappointed.

Sonia Purnell has meticulously researched the story of Virginia Hall, an unassuming young American woman who became one of the unsung female heroes of WWII. The fact that Virginia Hall was a disabled woman of her time, as she had a prosthetic leg (due to a horrendous self-inflicted accident while engaging in a snipe shooting event), makes her story even more remarkable.

I’ve recently been reading a lot about WWII. My dad, as many of his generation are, is very interested in this time period, as he was a child in the late 1940s and 1950s. I think he missed a lot of the significance of what had happened in Europe and the aftermath of the war because he was too young. His memories are confined to playing in bombed-out houses and stories from my great-grandparents, who hid during air raids. I played at school on the roof of a grassed-over Anderson shelter, so this history is still in the landscape of Britain and Europe.

Recently, I watched Nuremberg and learned about the trial and the process that was undertaken to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, so I felt that learning more about the resistance fighters who tried to liberate occupied Vichy France from the Germans would also be an interesting counterpoint to this.

The irony that the German Nazi war criminals' names are infamous, while Virginia Hall is practically unknown, does not come as a surprise to me. The fact that she was not promoted after the war, despite being arguably better qualified than all the men around her, should be a surprise, but is very much representative of the way that able women were treated during the 1950s. Hall was, however, acclaimed by many of the people that she worked alongside in the resistance, who referred to her as ‘The Madonna of the Mountains,’ as well as by her many code names.

Hall's ability to inspire loyalty, to galvanise and manage resistance against the Germans in extremely dangerous circumstances makes her an accessible and admirable figure. She won many local people’s trust, organised many parachute drops of materials needed, such as guns, ammunition and food and helped ensure the safe transfer of many people, saving countless lives. She narrowly escaped exposure by a very tricky double agent and had to flee across the Pyrenees in winter with her prosthetic limb, truly an epic undertaking of bravery and endurance. She also showed extreme courage, as, after being posted to Spain, which was at the time much less dangerous than occupied France, she requested to return to France even though she had come so close to being caught. In addition, her artistry in disguise and her self-sacrifice of her personal life, relationships with family and her willingness to forgo even the basics of life, such as soap, reveal a character that valued good over evil to an extraordinary extent.

In short, Virginia Hall is an admirable and courageous individual who should have received more accolades and acknowledgement, perhaps via a more senior job post-war during her lifetime! (However, Purnell makes it clear that Hall was not interested in the glory.) Purnell's book will hopefully bring her death-defying bravery and story to a wider, grateful audience.

A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell

Jenny