Sarah C. Patten, Author
Sarah Patten’s passion for history led to a discovery ten years ago of stories about female spies during WWII. “What I loved most about these women were how unexpected and heroic their lives were,” she says. “They were couriers, farm girls from Iowa, Polish orphans. They all found their way into the French Resistance through the most unexpected and unlikely paths.”
Reading biographies, historical accounts and journals helped Patten realize that the heroic efforts of the women went largely unrecognized and, in the years since 1940, many details have been lost. Two favorite heroines she learned about are Josephine Baker, an American who fled racist St. Louis for Paris, and Jeannie Rousseau, a Parisian woman who worked as a translator and provided classified German intelligence directly to the British government.
Patten named the protagonist in her debut novel The Measure of Gold Penelope after the heroine of Homer’s The Odyssey. Concern about a childhood friend leads Patten’s Penelope to leave Tennessee for Paris in 1940, where she becomes drawn into the world of espionage. “Much like Homer’s Penelope, the women of occupied France in WWII quietly resisted the Nazis every day,” Patten says. “Like Homer’s Penelope, their battlefront was their home. Like Homer’s Penelope, they did what they had to do to survive in a powerless and unprecedented situation. The Germans made the mistake of underestimating these women again and again because of the Nazis’ deeply misogynistic beliefs.”
The Measure of Gold, March, 2021, fiction, paperback $14.99, e-book $9.99, by Sarah C. Patten, and published by Ashland Press. See the book’s launch at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café at YouTu.be/PGYcE8tSvyc. Learn more at SarahCPatten.com.
