“However, Elizabeth wrote this at a time when she was being vilified. “I could get an authentic feel for Elizabeth Bentley’s voice and also the main events of her very eventful life,” she says. Having this source was both a help and a challenge to Thornton while writing her novel. “As a spy,” she explains, “Elizabeth Bentley destroyed most of the evidence of her espionage activities.” With one exception: Bentley published a memoir, Out of Bondage (The Devin-Adair Company, 1951). Thornton’s latest novel, A Most Clever Girl (Berkley, 2021) brings Elizabeth Bentley’s story to light, and it proved to be a demanding task for the author. Her confession to the FBI not only identified 41 Soviet sources operating throughout the U.S., it essentially took down the golden age of Soviet espionage, which had been ongoing for over 20 years. In the two years leading up to her defection, Bentley ran the largest spy ring in the United States. When American novelist Stephanie Marie Thornton went looking for “an amazing spy story during the Cold War,” she stumbled upon Elizabeth Bentley, a Soviet spy operating in America from 1938 until she defected in 1945. Complicated Woman: A Most Clever Girl by Stephanie Marie Thornton
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