How Virginia Hall, born in Baltimore into a wealthy American family, became so damaging and destructive to the Gestapo in occupied France is one of the best WWII stories I’ve come across, and inspired the espionage storyline in The Golden Doves.
The French Resistance leaders called Virginia la Dame qui boite, the Limping Lady, since she had a wooden leg. To the German Gestapo she was known as Artemis, one of the most hunted Allied spies in France. Virginia was a radio operator and worked for a secret British organization, The Special Operations Executive, SOE, and became one of their most valuable and bravest agents, outwitting the Nazis time and again.
Her story is so beautifully told in A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell, which reads like fiction and makes a great companion read to The Golden Doves.
