A Woman of No Importance summary

Paris was home to a thrilling artistic and literary scene when Virginia arrived in 1926 at 20 years old. It was worlds away from Prohibition-era America’s racial segregation. Writers like Hemingway and Getrude Stein haunted bohemian cafés, and prostitutes, philosophers and painters rubbed shoulders in smoky jazz clubs. 

Virginia enrolled in a language course at the École libre des sciences politiques. She was soon fluent in French, though she retained her distinctive Maryland drawl. It was a carefree time, and it left a lasting impression. Virginia would forevermore regard France, a country she associated with freedom, as her second home. 

German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany. With little real assistance from its Western allies, Poland didn’t stand a chance against the Wehrmacht’s overwhelming firepower; it fell in early October. It was Hitler’s first conquest of the Second World War. 

Virginia was watching events unfold from Estonia, a small Baltic nation facing a different menace – annexation by the Soviet Union. It was time to leave, and Virginia escaped to England. She was keen to contribute to the war effort and volunteered for the women’s branch of the British Army. After being rejected, she returned to France and enrolled as a military ambulance driver in Metz, northeastern France. 

Britain was badly outgunned when the SOE was established in July 1940. This not only meant that it couldn't be picky about hiring women, but that it would have to find a different way of fighting the war. Lacking conventional forces capable of going toe to toe with the Wehrmacht, Britain resorted to “ungentlemanly” tactics. F Section, the SOE’s France taskforce, consequently had just one job: sabotage. 

That required people who knew the lay of the land. More importantly, it required folks with the guts and guile to lead an underground existence and evade Nazi Germany’s terrifying secret police, the Gestapo, and its military counterpart, the Abwehr. Bellows believed he had found someone who ticked all those boxes. 

Virginia was a natural spy. Sophisticated and charming, she soon had French officials eating out of her hand. Vichy, however, was too claustrophobic. The capital of the new French state was crawling with Gestapo agents and members of the French secret police, the Sûreté. It was time to move – but where? 

Lyon, a city 70 miles southeast of Vichy known for its secret societies and rebellious craft guilds, provided the answer. These were the kinds of networks the SOE hoped to tap into. It was also close to neutral Switzerland – a convenient bolthole if things went wrong – and surrounded by plains well-suited for parachute drops. 

The SOE had been hastily assembled by Hugh Dalton, a pugnacious Labour minister who spurned traditional military types and embraced unconventional tools in the fight against Nazi Germany. Virginia was one of them. Her arrival in France was a curveball the authorities hadn’t expected. But it was only a temporary advantage. 

On October 10, 1941, a British agent parachuting into Bergerac in southwestern France was knocked unconscious upon landing. Virginia’s men in the area couldn’t locate him; the Sûreté had better luck. When they searched the unfortunate jumper they found a clue in his pocket which would unravel the network the SOE had painstakingly constructed over the previous months. 

Virginia took every precaution to avoid detection. She was slow to trust, avoided compromising romantic relationships and chose hotels with multiple exits as her base. Like every agent, she lived in fear of being brûlée – French for “burnt” or exposed. Despite that, Germany’s secret forces were closing in. 

The prison break was the final straw for the German high command. Already frustrated by mounting resistance in the “free zone,” Hitler ordered a clampdown. Thanks to recent radio intercepts, the Abwehr had figured out that a woman was orchestrating the Resistance in Lyon, but they still didn’t have a name. Now they dispatched 500 agents to locate the target they knew as “the limping lady.” 

The Wehrmacht had seemed invincible for three years. That changed in the fall of 1942. The Soviet Red Army encircled German forces in Stalingrad and began to turn the tide on the Eastern Front. Britain liberated Egypt and Libya in October and pinned the Germans down in Tunisia. A month later, US soldiers landed in Vichy-controlled Algeria and Morocco. 

The German response to the loss of North Africa, a potential launching pad for an Allied invasion of France, was immediate. Pétain’s government was swept aside, and Nazi shock troops flooded into the “free zone.” It was a game-changer for Virginia. Operating in Vichy France had been dangerous enough; doing so under military occupation was nothing short of suicidal. 

The months following Virginia’s mountain escape were frustrating. Her SOE bosses refused to allow her back onto active service and gave her a menial job organizing safe houses in Spain. Her pay was reduced to the level of an embassy typist. Virginia had risked everything; the rewards were paltry. 

But she got another break. The United States had established a counterpart to the SOE in 1942 called the Office of Strategic Services or OSS. Since then, it had operated in the shadows of its British big brother. William Donovan, the London-based director of OSS, wanted to change that. As the Allies prepared to invade France in 1944, he seized an opportunity to boost his agency’s credibility.