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Overview
In 1942, posters appeared in Lyon, France’s third-largest city. The country had been defeated by Nazi Germany two years earlier and was occupied. However, the puppet regime installed by Hitler had a problem on its hands.
The problem was that the Allies had no one in France to guide them. This person’s name was Virginia Hall. Who is she? She’s an American socialite with a wooden leg named Cuthbert, who also happens to be a Francophile and the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines during World War II.
Virginia was an effective spy in the French Resistance. She had a vast network of operatives and helped defeat Hitler’s Germany by liberating France.
Virginia Hall was a spy who led an extraordinary life. She had a chance encounter with the French resistance and changed her life forever. The German secret police failed to catch Virginia during World War II, even though she limped from injuries that would have crippled anyone else. Her story is amazing because of all the risks she took as a spy for the Allies in World War II. The CIA brought her out of retirement years later, but it wasn’t quite what she expected…
Big Idea #1: Virginia Hall was too independent to obey her mother’s wish to settle down and marry.
The French Resistance was a heroic movement during the Second World War. It included ordinary people who organized themselves against Hitler’s army, the Wehrmacht. Many of these brave men and women lost their lives in this guerilla campaign, but they were not outnumbered or poorly equipped; they fought courageously with what little resources they had.
But our story doesn’t begin in Europe. The hero of the story, Virginia Hall, wasn’t French either. She was born in Maryland and her family was ambitious to climb up the social ladder. They married their boss but it didn’t take them as far as they had hoped because he squandered his inherited fortune and could only provide his family with the trappings of wealth.
The Halls’ house looked grand, but it was far from the residences of their more affluent neighbors. It lacked central heating and running water, so it wasn’t modern. However, Barbara had a plan – to find a wealthy suitor for her daughter Virginia by sending her to an elite school called Roland Park Country School with that goal in mind. Virginia was independent and spirited as well as tall and slim with sparkling brown eyes; she wore trousers instead of skirts or dresses like most girls did at the time. She liked hunting with rifles, riding horses bareback (without saddles), skinning rabbits and making bracelets out of live snakes!
She valued her freedom, but she also loved her mother. After graduating in 1924, Virginia tried to please her mother by getting engaged at 18 years old. It didn’t last long because it was a valiant attempt for something that women were fighting against in the 1920s: being subservient to men and having no rights as citizens of their country. Women wanted change, so they fought for voting rights and started wearing their hair short and smoking cigarettes—things that Barbara would never have allowed. Within a year of getting engaged, Virginia broke off the engagement and became more independent from her mother’s wishes.
Virginia Woolf was a young woman who had no interest in settling down and having a family. She wanted to travel the world and see new places. There were only two options open to women at that time, marriage or remaining single. Virginia chose to remain single because she loved traveling so much.
