Because women have often been able to pass unnoticed, throughout history there have been many stories about real-life heroines who were spies! Here are a few favorites.
The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear
Set in Post WWII Britain in 1947, former wartime operative, Elinor White is drawn back into the world of menace she has been desperate to leave behind. Known as private and quiet, Elinor is haunted by her past and becomes involved in exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government.
The Mozart Code by Rachel McMillan
Lady Sophia Huntington Villiers (code name Starling) is part of a covert team in post-war Vienna working to uncover information in the high stakes world of the mounting Cold War. Simon Barrington has been in love with Sophie Villiers since the moment he met her, Simon seeks answers about Sophie only to learn that everything he thought he knew is based on a lie.
Spy by Danielle Steel
A young woman is caught up in a dangerous double life on behalf of her country during World War II. As a first aid nursing volunteer in London, Alex has skills that draws her into the art of espionage, leading to life-and-death missions behind enemy lines and a long career as a spy in exotic places and historic times.
A Question of Betrayal by Anne Perry
The first in a new historical mystery series follows Elena Standish, a daring young photographer travels to Mussolini’s Italy to rescue the lover, and MI6 informant, who betrayed her.
The Chemist by Stephanie Meyer
An expert in her field, she was one of the darkest secrets of an agency so clandestine it doesn’t even have a name. And when they decided she was a liability, they came for her without warning. They’ve killed the only other person she trusted, but something she knows still poses a threat. They want her dead, and soon. When her former handler offers her a way out, she realizes it’s her only chance to erase the giant target on her back. But it means taking one last job for her ex-employers.
The Hollywood Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal
In the foothills of Hollywood, a woman floats lifeless in the pool of one of California’s trendiest hotels. American-born secret agent and British spy Maggie Hope learns that this woman was engaged to her former fiancee, John Sterling and that he suspects her death was no accident. In 1943 Los Angeles, the Zoot Suit Riots loom large and the Ku Klux Klan casts a long shadow everywhere. Maggie discovers things aren’t always the way things appear in the movies, and the political situation in America is more complicated, and dangerous, than the newsreels would have them all believe.
Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy by Ben McIntyre
In 1942, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. Her neighbors didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. This true-life spy story is about the woman code-named “Sonya,” a dedicated Communist, Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.
The Light of Days by Judy Batalion
The extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters. The “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade and helped build systems of underground bunkers. Judy Batalion, the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, takes us back to 1939 to follow these women through an unforgettable true tale of war, the fight for freedom, exceptional bravery, female friendship, and survival in the face of staggering odds.
Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler by Lynne Olson
In 1941 a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman, a young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade became the leader of Alliance, a French spy network that supplied as crucial intelligence–including providing American and British military commanders with a 55-foot-long map of the beaches and roads on which the Allies would land on D-Day.
Spy by Paolo Coelho
As paranoia consumed a country at war, Mata Hari’s lifestyle as a dancer, shocked and delighted audiences and bewitched the era’s richest and most powerful men. Her notoriety brought her under suspicion. In 1917, she was arrested accused of espionage.
This is an unforgettable story of a woman who dared to defy convention and who paid the ultimate price.