This is a talentedly written biography. I recommend this story. The presentation is as wonderful as the actual life she lived. This is the story of the First American female foreign intelligence officer. We learn about her amazing life and her personality that lead her to this job. It also shows us the world of the 1920s. It is an amazing story. Anyone interested in history this is a must-read. It is well written with wonderfully documented information included giving us the entire story. If you like this type of writing with great detail then you will be overjoyed to read this. It is a true academic writing.

This biography is about the life of an American spy. Having read many spy stories like Nancy Wake, I was intrigued by this woman whom I never heard before. It turns out that Marguerite was an incredibly fascinating and courageous woman! The only thing I did not like about this book was it seemed overly long and drawn out. This was perhaps because there was very little information about her. Still, I recommend this for those that like learning about fascinating but little known women!

An interesting read that I'm glad to have discovered. I'll definitely be seeking out more by this author.

I want to thank NetGalley for allowing me a chance to read this book.

I got halfway through this book and I had to take a pause. I plan on coming back to this book when I am in the proper mind-set for it.

Ms. Atwood wrote a clear picture of Marguerite Harrison , she was bright , daring and complex. I went on to do some research of this woman after reading the book and was amazed at her tenacity in the Russian jail system, it might be a good follow up to read one of Ms. Harrison' own books. I can see that it may have difficult to get more personal if she did not leave any trace of diaries or journals. It may have been helpful to explore her relationships with her mother and her relationships with men, her son to add to the picture. I was fascinated with her fearlessness and espionage skills . She is an unsung hero of her day and so this story needed to be told - thanks to the author .

A fascinating and beautifully written book about a person I wasn't aware existed. It can be a little tedious at time when cataloging all of the people from her early life but in general it was an enjoyable book.

“Marguerite once described herself as a chameleon. She would be a flirtatious debutante, a devoted housewife, a music and drama critic, a foreign correspondent, and an American secret agent.”

The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison follows the first female American spy, who began working for the Military Intelligence Division (MID), at the end of WWI. During the interwar war period, she ended up imprisoned in Russia for espionage not once but twice, made multiple perilous journeys through some incredibly remote areas, and picked up an astonishing number of languages.

Through the use of her charm and intelligence, Atwood was able to convince MID to take her on as their first female agent. She was sent into Europe to pose as a journalist in Berlin. When the war ended shortly thereafter, she continued to send information pertaining to the horrible living conditions of the German people. But Atwood had her eyes set on a different locale: she very much wanted to conduct her espionage activities in Russia.

Once she managed to get into Russia, Harrison was very quickly detained by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. She was given the option (on threat of imprisonment) to pass information onto the Soviets and act as a double agent. After a little while, discontent with the quality of information provided by Harrison, the Cheka arrested and imprisoned her in the notorious Lubyanka Soviet prison.

While Harrison was eventually released in exchange for American food aid, she was not content to leave Russia for good. A little while later, she would return, trekking through the Far East of Russia, hoping to avoid the Red Army. Following her second imprisonment, Harrison would never return to her beloved Russia.

The contradictory information surrounding Harrison’s life has led many to conclude that she was in actuality a Soviet agent. The strange circumstances surrounding her second arrest and imprisonment—which I will leave for those who read the book to discover—certainly support this conclusion. Harrison’s life has all of the ingredients for an incredible spy book.

The story itself was very captivating, but the pacing of this book was incredibly slow. Harrison’s spy activities did not take up as much of the book as I would have liked. As soon as I felt it starting to get good, the author launched into a very lengthy description of Harrison’s time in the Middle East working on a movie, which appears to have been a cover for more espionage work. Given the lack of information about much of Harrison’s spy career, there was a lot of filler in this book.

Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to anyone looking to learn more about this remarkable woman. I did enjoy the story itself, even though it did drag at parts.

Thank you so much to the Naval Institute Press and Netgalley for the free copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was a fascinating book. Obviously well researched and full of details, it tells the story of a woman who I had never heard of before, yet by her own account, and the title of the book, was instrumental in breaking women into the world of international espionage.

Marguerite Harrison was born into a rich, well connected family in Baltimore, MD. Her father was a shipping magnate, and she summered in Europe meeting Kings and Queens of Europe. She seemed to be a natural at learning languages and could often be mistaken for a native speaker, which is no small feat. She married for love, to a man probably beneath her station, she was widowed in her 30’s, with little money left to raise her son, so Marguerite found a job as a journalist covering society and gossip and theater reviews. A perfectly suitable job for a woman at the time. No doubt, with nationalist fever taking over during WWI, and wanting to write about more than tea parties, she felt the urge to do more for her country and somehow convinced the Army to let her go to Europe after the Armistice to access the situation.

There are certainly parts of her story that don’t seem to make sense, and even the author points to conflicting narratives between sources. Was Marguerite a double agent? Was she having an affair with a Russian? Why did she return so quickly to the Soviet Union after being released from prison for being a spy? I think she was spoiled. I think she had been spoiled her entire life and given into her every whim and never for a moment believed she would be executed. She saw everything as an adventure, and she was the star.

I found the story about her traveling through the Middle East with Merian Cooper (whom she helped survived a Soviet prisoner of war camp) and Ernest Schoedsack making the movie “Grass” fascinating. (Cooper and Schoedsack went on the make King Kong). I even watched the movie on the Internet. It brought to life the stories from the book and it was amazing seeing these tribesmen cross the raging river with the animals and then cling over the mountain barefooted while digging a path through the snow with shovels!

In the afterward, the author says Marguerite was a failure, both professionally and personally. I’m not sure she felt that way. As a spy, she did not follow the path of Mata Hari-she did not trade sex for secrets. Again, I think she saw it all as a game. How much information can I get out of you? It is amazing to see the access she was able to gain to high ranking people in so many countries. She was an amazing polyglot with a natural affinity for languages (she taught herself Persian while waiting for Cooper and Schoedsack in Turkey). We may never know if she was a double agent or what information she traded if any, but she definitely opened doors for women without realizing or trying to.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers, and the author for an ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This is an ambitiously undertaken book following the history of Marguerite Harrison. The author has obviously slogged through a ton of material in order to piece together this extraordinary woman's life.

I enjoyed every minute of reading this book. Marguerite was a bit society lady, a bit adventurer, and a whole lot of enigma. You are left enjoying her escapades around the globe, seeing her struggle in her personal life, wondering what she really was thinking, and trying to diagnose what kind of neuroses she lived with.

I especially loved her interpretations of people and conditions in the early Soviet state.

Keep an open mind as you read, and you will find yourself transported into the experience of living a life of an extremely intelligent woman trying to live within the boundaries of her society.

Since this was an advanced copy, I'm going to ignore the many typos and grammatical errors for my review as I hope they will be corrected before publishing. I'll also attribute the randomly placed U.S. Naval Institute seal that was all over the place. My rating is based on the information alone.

This book was interesting and, I think, well written for the average person. It isn't too technical and Marguerite was a fascinating woman. I had never heard of her before reading this so I can't speak to any accuracy. Based on the notes section, I would say it was well researched. She was a complicated and messy person and I don't think that even she knew why she did many of the things that she did. Because of that, it made it harder for other's to try to understand why she made some of the decisions that she did and they fared no better. We will likely never know her true motivations, mostly because I don't think that even she knew what her true motivations were. Overall, an interesting read!

I absolutely loved The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison by Elizabeth Atwood! The writing kept me turning the pages to the very end! The research the author has done to write this book is remarkable! I found that I learned so much more than just about a woman in espionage! I couldn't put this book down! I will be recommending this one for days to come!

Marguerite was a fascinating person, sometimes in a positive way, other times negatively. I admired her linguistic ability to so quickly pick up languages like Russian and Persian. She was courageous to visit so many countries with squalid conditions.
The explanation of double agents being con men seems to fit her. Calm and stable, but can’t tolerate routine or boredom. No lasting emotional relationships. Exploitive of others. Skeptical about motives and abilities of others, but exaggerated notions of her own competence. She wanted everyone to listen to her foreign policy views, but was enamored with Russia. Many people were wary of her honesty, probably with good reason.
The people she met in her travels was amazing: an American owned a ranch breeding racehorses in China; a Swiss ran a dairy farm, also in China; a Dane owned the American Trading Company general store in an eastern Soviet city. Why did these folks prefer to live in harsh circumstances?
Very interesting look of the 1920s.

In this biography, Elizabeth Atwood tells us of the life and adventures of Marguerite Harrison, ‘America’s First Female Intelligence Agent’. In the book, a well-documented piece of research, we discover a woman of spirit, culture, and individualistic ways. However, one is left to wonder if the title, "The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison", refers to the two times Mrs Harrison had to be rescued from imprisonment due to accusations of espionage in the nascent USSR; from her bourgeois background; or from the constraints being a woman imposed on her.

Marguerite Harrison, we learn, was born in a well off, and well known, Baltimore family. Never a conformist, she learned to use her social skills to influence others, to get her way, to reach beyond the home. Following widowhood, she decided to become a journalist, before deciding she wanted more adventures and to experience directly the aftermath of WW1 in Europe. Using her connections, her polyglot skills, as well as her wiles, she managed to get herself a position as a spy in Germany. From then, she turned to Russia, a country undergoing deep changes which impacted her so much she may have turned coat. Despite repeated stints in Lubyanka Prison she remained interested in international affairs, possibly even going to the Middle East on additional missions disguised as cinema, but was never really trusted again.

I find the Afterword most truthful: “Marguerite Harrison was a failure”, both personally and professionally. The accounts her biographer Atwood has to draw on (Harrison’s own memoirs) are suspect, whilst all other documents show a very short-lived flare of grace. The premise of a woman breaking stereotypes is tempting, yet "The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison" demonstrates that being extraordinary does not necessarily mean being admirable.

Who would enjoy this
Mrs Harrison’s biography is the sort of book that I would often suggest for people who like well researched work. This is particularly true for those who like biographies, not gossip. This is an unabashed investigative paper, reliant on its many footnotes and data.

Additionally, Atwood’s work is clearly an example of a woman overcoming social and political ‘glass ceilings’. Readers with an eye for female history will definitely find it both enlightening and empowering.

Who should give this a pass
As already mentioned, Atwood herself recognises that this is not a story of success. Therefore, I would not suggest it for readers who idealise or, worse, romanticise spies. Even less so if they are looking for a feminist and idealist woman ‘pioneer’ to use as example.

Another group who may not enjoy this volume are those who want light, rousing, biography. Even with the best intentions, and the narrator trying to justify her heroine from time to time, Mrs Harrison’s life was not inspirational.

Conclusions and suggestions
Elizabeth Atwood presents us with a book more academic than general biography. The depth and constancy of reference use is admirable, as opposed to many other similar works. Also, the author tries very hard to remain a mere biographer, not a judge, which deserves praise. Sadly, she cannot help but try to ‘save’ her subject from time to time with inserts which show clear leaps of faith, as well as lack of notes. The most extreme – the suggestion that maybe it was Mrs Harrison who was trying to lure Solomon Mogilevsky, head of Russian Foreign Intelligence, into becoming an agent for the US – makes one cringe.

Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised by the awareness Atwood shows, at the end of the volume. It speaks of honest reporting, her own interests and expectations notwithstanding (although clear in between the lines). Bravo, because "The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison" dares show that the sort of person to life such extraordinary a life is not nice, and thoughtful, and trustworthy. Even more so, it exposes how such a choice of lifestyle would impact those around, for generations to come.

So yes, I applaud Ms Atwood on a coherent narrative report. After all, my main issue with the tome is the unbelievable account of certain events, that I understand derives from having to depend on Mrs Harrison’s clearly unreliable writings as source. In turn, this takes me to my main suggestions for biographies:
- When there are no sources for comparison of claims, explicitly remind the reader to take it all with a pinch (sometimes, a whole shaker-full) of salt.
- Don’t try to justify any actions or put forward theories, unless you have solid evidence to back you up.
- Be conscious of the format you are presenting to your reader. Notes and references as a section at the end of the book is good in traditional print format, but an e-reader would find that less comfortable than as footnotes on the page.

Marguerite Harrison was born into American aristocracy as it were. With rich Baltimore family connections, parents high up in the social classes and considered attractive according to her time, she had pretty much everything a young woman could want. She married for love, had a child and lived the life expected of her by her family, the charmed life. But then her husband died suddenly and she was suddenly a widow at 37 years of age, hardly the time to put her feet up and live the rest of her life in quiet solitude doing good works and being a society dame. She took it into her head to become a journalist and worked for a time as such, but decided that working for the government as a spy during WW1 was much more the kind of job she craved. Despite some major reservations about whether a woman could even do the job (without resorting to using sexual methods to gain intelligence) Harrison eventually found someone who was willing to place her in a situation as such to gather information against the Russian nation that was currently in turmoil with the take over by Stalin and communism and the anarchy that ensued. For several years Harrison worked as a spy, was taken prisoner and lead a life of wild adventure before settling down again in her later years with her second husband and eventually died a relative nobody.

With those few words, Marguerite Harrison's life can be summed up. She was., according to this biographer, not really a successful spy, indeed she could be considered a failure, who was captured, confessed her activities, implicated other people, putting their lives into danger, she was careless with her information and quite possibly had a romantic attachment to one of her capturers. And she failed in her personal life also; she betrayed her mother, had a sexual relationship with her brother-in-law and often was guilty of abandoning her only son in situations that were less than conducive to him being able to live his best life, being brought up by servants and grandparents as she galivanted around the world seeking adventure. All in all, there really is not a lot to like about this woman.

But this biography, which one must recognise as being difficult to write because of the lack of evidence and the trouble corroborating information resulting from conflicting reports was still detailed and took the reader along a journey of Harrison's life, never shying away from showing Harrison being truly mercurial and near impossible to follow. There is always the danger in biography to give too much information as to laden it down with facts and figures, losing the flow of the story, or it doesn’t give enough information leaving the reader feeling cheated of really knowing and understanding the person being explored. This book treads the fine line between the two possibilities and keeps the story moving along at a fine pace but never becoming bogged down with minutiae that can be boring reading.

The one consistent issue with this book is that all too often during the reading of this piece, it became difficult to develop any form of attachment to Harrison and care about her life. Much is made of her being the first female Foreign Intelligence Agent, but the reality is, Harrison was never much into feminism, didn’t go after the job because of a deep belief that woman could and should be working for their countries and she didn’t really do such a great job at what she was doing. Other women who came after her would possibly be much more interesting subjects of study. Harrison is studied simply because she was the first, not because she was the best.

This biography is interesting in its insights into how the American government began to seek out its intelligence work, and it was interesting for the development of the world and how it changed so dramatically from when Harrison was born to her death. If you read this book expecting to find a feminist hero you will be sorely disappointed.

This is a highly readable book. I read this book during the quarantine when people stated that they had problems concentrating and reading books. However, I was able to enjoy this book.

Like many foreign agents she came from upper society and had many political connections. She was a flawed person both on a personal and professional level. Perhaps as to be expected from a spy, Marguerite Harrison herself was a bit of a mystery. Often times there are discrepancies between her and other people’s version of events. There were enough of these differences in versions of events with multiple individuals to make me think that Marguerite Harrison herself often was the one who was lying.

Her motivations to be an agent seemed to be a desire for adventure rather than from patriotism. She started as her career in espionage by doing domestic spying and providing information on other Americans. I have read in other books that informants are often not reliable people.

The one weakness I found with the book is that the author does not make the case until the end of the book of why the reader should be interested in Marguerite Harrison considering she got caught as a spy and had many personal flaws.