Shakespeare - Priscilla The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France

If I was initially wary, thinking that Id seen this done before in fiction and drama, once I started it I was hooked. And when I realized that she hadnt been a brave and beautiful spy, I was double hooked. Its truth is necessary and essential, and makes the last chapters terrifyingly poignant and moving.

Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of an Ending

A fascinating, complicated story.

Entertainment Weekly

As Mr. Shakespeare does his research, the mystery of Priscilla begins to recede, and so does her glamour. She is revealed as possibly less worthybut maybe more intriguing.... Our hunger to know what she thought and felt is a tribute to just how much of her he has been able to put on the page.

New York Times

A most strange and compelling book driven by the writers unsparing search for truth: now an optimistic hunt for a family heroine, now a study in female wiles of survival, now a portrait of one very ordinary persons frailty in the face of terrible odds.

John le Carr, author of A Delicate Truth and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

The story that unfolded is remarkable, and his account of it is riveting.... Priscilla is, like almost all biographies, necessarily incomplete, but as a picture of France during the dark years of the occupation it is wonderfully full of light and shade, sympathetic and highly intelligent.... An astonishing story.

Wall Street Journal

Fascinating.... Shakespeare probes his aunts wartime years with finesse and pathos.... His reconstruction of Priscillas life is meticulous and tantalizing.

Boston Globe

A gripping excavation of a womans secret past, Priscilla is also a fascinating portrait of France during the Second World War, and of the many shadowy and corrupt deals made by the French with their Nazi occupiers.

Caroline Moorehead, author of Village of Secrets and A Train in Winter

Gripping.

New York Times Book Review

This mysterious story of the Occupation in France has all the qualities of a fascinating novel, with exquisite social, sexual, and moral nuance.

Antony Beevor, author of The Second World War and D-Day

Thrilling.... An intimate family memoir, a story of survival, and a quest for biographical truth.

Tatler

Nicholas Shakespeare has employed all his superb gifts as a writer to tell the picaresque tale of his aunt in wartime occupied France. Priscilla is a femme fatale worthy of fiction, and the author traces her tangled, troubled, romantic, and often tragically unromantic experiences through one of the most dreadful periods of twentieth-century history.

Max Hastings, author of Catastrophe 1914 and Inferno: The World at War, 19391945

A tantalizingly original perspective on the Second World War.... In his engaging detective story, as he pieces Priscillas war years together, Shakespeare shines a moving, intriguing light on the moral quandaries faced by ordinary citizens.

Sunday Times Best Book of the Year Citation (London)

A wonderfully readable quest for answers.... Mr. Shakespeare... is too good a writer to succumb to sensationalism. Instead, and after some impressive research, he builds a nuanced, sensitive portrait of this sad and glamorous member of his family.... As the life of Priscilla shows, surviving the occupation was too complicated an affair for any black-and-white verdict.

The Economist

Remarkable.... A detailed and vivid narrative. This is a moving and constantly surprising story.

The Independent (London)

A wonderful book.... I have not read a better portrait of the moral impossibility of that time and place for people, like Priscilla, who found themselves trapped in it.

Daily Telegraph (London)

Gripping.... Shakespeare makes no claim to arrive at a grand conclusion in this book, but, if there were one, it might be that the struggle for survival is rarely as noble as comfortable peacetime generations might wish it to be.... An extraordinary voyage into the truth.... Priscilla brilliantly exposes the tangled complexities behind that question so easily asked from the comfort of a peacetime armchair: What would I have done?

The Observer (London)

F ICTION

The Vision of Elena Silves

The High Flyer

The Dancer Upstairs

Snowleg

Secrets of the Sea

Inheritance

N ONFICTION

Bruce Chatwin

In Tasmania

TO LALAGE, IMOGEN, TRACEY AND CARLETON

{Frontispiece Pris in Occupied France [TM]}

Everything is simple in men, and in women, if you look at them from the outside, and watch them, hesitating and laughing on the brink of the world. And everything is simple too, long afterward, when life is over and done with and you explain them after their death, looking back on lives which are now only history. It is while it is still unfolding and still taking place that fate is obscure and sometimes mysterious.
JEAN DORMESSON , At Gods Pleasure

Well, there are worse things than fornication.
ALLAN MASSIE , A Question of Loyalties

Tell all.
GRAHAM GREENE TO GILLIAN SUTRO

On the third day the Gestapo appeared with machine guns and drove Priscilla to 11 Rue des Saussaies. She was taken to the basement and stripped. The air was thin, sucked into the cellars by a hand-turned ventilator. Beneath a strong electric bulb a grey-uniformed woman conducted a full and humiliating body search for cyanide pills, and picked through her clothes. Then she was ordered to dress and led upstairs into a large room where a man interrogated her for twelve hours.

Priscilla was accustomed to strangers asking probing questions. In the internment camp at Besanon, she was obliged to fill out forms which demanded to know her family descent, blood group, names of parents, political persuasion, religion. She had to write the answers in duplicate, and it was confusing if you did not speak German. The Commandant had reprimanded one internee for writing domestic servant in the space for religion.

This was more invasive, headier. More personal.

The man talked in French, but it was obvious that he spoke English. It served nothing to lie, his manner said. Where had she been at school? What books did she like reading? He asked about her mother and father, branching off into her marriage and lovers. He checked her replies against the two identity cards which the Gestapo had found on her, and against her previous interrogation by the French police. He was well prepared and ruthless.

When had she first come to France? Why had she stayed? The occupying authorities had released her from Besanon, he noted, because she was expecting a child. What had happened to the baby?

It died, she said.

His eyes looked at her and dropped back to her French carte didentit no. 40 CC 92076, in the name of Priscilla Doynel de la Sausserie and registering her as sans profession. This card was no longer valid; it had run out in October the previous year.

He picked up her British passport, flicked through the pages. Mais, Priscilla Rosemary, b. 12 July 1916, Sherborne (England). Height, 5'9". Colour of eyes blue.