Despite her mother's fervent dreams for Virginia Hall to marry well, the Baltimore socialite always nursed grander ambitions. Even when, at the age of twenty-seven, her leg was amputated after a hunting accident, Hall donned a prosthetic leg (which she called Cuthbert), moved abroad to work for the State Department, and volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French army on the front lines of World War II. From there she would talk her way into a position in Winston Churchill's Special Operations Executive, where she became the first female Allied spy deployed in occupied France, playing a major role in establishing the Resistance. Based on extensive research and told with verve and enthusiasm, A Woman of No Importance is a riveting biography of a wildly underappreciated hero who "helped to pioneer a daredevil role of espionage, sabotage, and subversion behind enemy lines in an era when women barely featured in the prism of heroism…when they were just expected to look nice and act obedient and let the men do the heavy lifting."