Marie-Madeleine Fourcade led a French intelligence network supplying information to MI6. Barbara Bertram ran a secret safe house for agents in Surrey. They met several times. Here, Rachel Hore writes about how the two women sparked the idea for her new novel, and the challenges of writing fiction about real people.
My new novel, The French Spymistress, is inspired by the parallel stories of two real-life women involved in undercover work for Britain during the Second World War.
Marie-Madeleine Méric (later Fourcade) led the French intelligence network Alliance that supplied vital secret information to MI6 during the Nazi Occupation of the country between 1940 and 1944. This allowed the Allies to build a more detailed picture of German military and naval operations and plan the liberation of France that began on D-Day, 6 June 1944.
She escaped to England in 1943, where she was forced to live for a year, managing her secret activities at a distance.
Barbara Bertram, a wife and mother living in rural Sussex, was drawn into war work by her husband Tony, a writer and lecturer who spoke fluent French. Tony was deputed by MI6 to assist with the welfare and training of French agents, including many Alliance members, who were flown between the two countries in little planes on moonlit nights.
Bignor Manor, the Bertrams’ modest manor house in the shelter of the South Downs, became a secret safe house where Barbara, at great personal cost, welcomed hundreds of strangers over the course of the war, sending them on their way heartened and refreshed by her sympathetic hospitality. One of these French visitors was Marie-Madeleine. She and Barbara met on several occasions.
I first read about Bignor Manor in Julie Summers’s Our Uninvited Guests, a fascinating account of the various uses that requisitioned big houses were put to in wartime Britain. Deeper reading about the Bertrams’ activities led me to Marie-Madeleine and my idea to explore in fiction the two women’s contrasting contributions to the war effort.
I was particularly struck by their different brands of personal courage and their strong sense of duty – qualities demonstrated, as we are still learning, by a great many women in this conflict.
It is notable that after the war, neither’s achievement was publicly recognised or honoured to the same degree as that of the men they worked alongside. Indeed they did not appear to expect it to be. That is how things were then.
Long after the war, both women published gripping accounts of their war work — though, somewhat frustratingly, each memoir only mentions the other in passing. In fictionalising their stories I tried to burrow deeper into this autobiographical material, to imagine what they might have left out and what they thought about their experiences. I was especially curious about the confidences they exchanged when they met and what each thought about the other. Here my imagination took over.
Historical novelists will understand the pitfalls of turning often-random, real-life events into the archetypal three-act structure of a novel. It was this process, plus the ethical considerations of inhabiting real-life characters that I found most challenging in conceiving and writing The French Spymistress.
For dramatic reasons, I simplified complex historical events and pared down the cast of real-life characters – Alliance regularly comprised 1,000 active agents!
I also fictionalised the central characters’ names to allow myself greater creative freedom. Hence, Marie-Madeleine is ‘Marie-Louise’ in the novel, Barbara is ‘Sarah’ and her husband Tony is ‘Miles’. I’m curious how often other historical writers choose to do this in their fiction.
Several books proved particularly useful in my research. Noah’s Ark, Marie-Madeleine’s detailed and powerful 1968 memoir, helped me determine her voice in the novel – I was impressed by her decency, the clarity of her moral compass and the deep love and care she felt for the men and women working under her in conditions of extreme danger.
The memoir is a little erratic about chronology, however, and, understandably, she omitted mention of the clandestine love affair she conducted with her closest lieutenant, only lately come to light. For this and much else I turned to Lynne Olson’s recent Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, impressive for its research, insight and accessibility.
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Barbara Bertram’s short but compelling French Resistance in Sussex is based on a series of talks she gave in later life. I also tracked down The Secret of Bignor Manor, compiled by the Bertrams’ third son, Jerome, a goldmine of information about his parents’ lives and work as well as providing thrilling detail about the Lysander flights carrying agents to and from France.
This is my second novel about female spies. A Beautiful Spy published in 2021, fictionalized the extraordinary story of Olga Gray, who spied on members of the British Communist party for MI5 in the early 1930s.
What attracts me to the subject? Perhaps the observable fact that many ordinary women are forced by circumstances to lead guarded daily lives in order to protect themselves and those whom they love. Could there be some correlation?
The French Spymistress by Rachel Hore is published on 2 July, 2026.
Read more about this book.
Rachel worked in London publishing for many years before moving with her family to Norwich, where she taught publishing and creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a full-time writer.
Read Rachel’s Historia feature about Olga Gray.
She’s also written about the background to her last book, The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge, in Women in science – a true story.
You may also be interested in reading:
The women agents behind the D-Day invasion by Mara Timon
The Remarkable Women of WII by Clare Harvey
The French Resistance: shadier than you think by Chris Lloyd
Our interviews with Clare Mulley, the historian who’s written the biographies of two women spies: Krystyna Skarbek, also known as Christine Granville, and Elżbieta Zawacka, or Agent Zo.
Images:
- Plaque, Place Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Paris: Chabe01 for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s false ID card (using the name Marie Suzanne Imbert), before 1944: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Bignor Manor House, West Sussex, England: Charlesdrakew for Wikimedia (public domain)
- Detail from the cover of the author’s copy of Noah’s Ark by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade
- Westland Lysander IIIa in all-black camouflage, as used for special night missions into occupied France (slightly cropped): Alan Wilson for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0
