Sonia Purnell, "A Woman of No Importance"

April 11, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

This lecture is in conjunction with the Royal Oak Foundation.

In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent command: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young socialite from Baltimore, who, after being rejected from the Foreign Service because of her gender and prosthetic leg, talked her way into the SOE, the WWII British spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare." Hall, known as the "Madonna of the Resistance," was one of the greatest spies in American and English history, yet her full story remains untold. At a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden, Hall coordinated a network of spies to report on German troop movements, arranged equipment parachute drops for Resistance fighters, and recruited and trained guerrilla units to ambush enemy convoys and blow up bridges and railroads. Even as her face covered WANTED posters throughout Europe, Hall refused orders to evacuate. She finally escaped in a death- defying climb over of the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown, and her associates imprisoned or executed. But, adamant that she had more lives to save, she plunged back into the field with the American OSS secret service, directing partisan armies to back up the Allied forces landing on Normandy beaches. A Woman of No Importance: The Spy Who Helped Win WWII will reveal the captivating story of a formidable, yet shockingly overlooked, heroine whose fierce persistence helped win the war.