“A Very Dangerous Woman” by Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield – Revolutionary Passions

There are few professions out there that inspire the same atmosphere of intensity, danger and adventure as spying. Though it is true that in many cases being a spy amounted to getting some documents from point A to point B until one gets caught, there are some out there who went about their line of work with real panache, leaving behind a trail of stories fitting for a novel. Moura Budberg is one such person, often referred to as Russia's most seductive spy, at least during her time.

Deborah McDonald (who specializes in biographies) and Jeremy Dronfield have decided to examine that woman's life and weave a narration worthy of her exploits, which resulted in them publishing A Very Dangerous Woman.

In this book, the two authors basically turn Budberg's life into the kind of story you can read for both education and entertainment, starting with her birth in 1892 and sparing no expense getting down to the finer details until the date of her death.

We get to see the carefree and selfish life she was gifted as an aristocrat, how her life spiraled into the realms of excitement upon meeting Robert Bruce Lockhart, how she spied for the Bolsheviks and the British, how she ultimately sacrificed all but her life in the name of love.

When looking at this book from an entertainment perspective, the authors certainly did a wonderful job at ensuring nothing feels like it was taken from a history book.

The plot unfolds in an exciting way with some twists and dramatic peaks, introducing us to not only a myriad of important people who were closely connected to Budberg, such as H.G. Wells himself as well as the worldwide-famous Maxim Gorky, but also to the Russian Revolution itself.

Baroness Moura Budberg: the Mata Hari of Russia

Source: The Vintage News

The few years which the country spent reorganizing itself on a massive scale are intricately and vividly detailed, easily plucking the reader's attention in a death grip; the description of the whole upheaval is simply phenomenal.

In addition we get to learn about an often-forgotten and yet rather interesting part of the 20th century, the three decades between both World Wars, when Europe made for a very interesting expose.

As far as our factual concerns go, the authors certainly drew on a real gold mine of information, with their sources including innumerable personal letters, diaries and official government documents. They do a very good job at tracing the path walked by Budberg from childhood until her passing, but it ought to be said that they haven't managed to shed the spotlight of truth on everything.

There are numerous suppositions, conjectures and hypotheses that simply stem from a lack of factual evidence, and at times it does become a bit obvious that the authors fill in the blanks in ways preferable to them and the story they are making.

Nevertheless, since there isn't much anyone can do about knowledge lost forever, the bits of imagination injected into the story don't hurt it at all... as a matter of fact, they even make it more enjoyable. After all, there would be little fun in littering the text with “...and we don't know what happened after.”

All in all, A Very Dangerous Woman is a fantastic book that can be read either as a work of education or a novel. It is certainly the most detailed portrayal of Moura Budberg to date, and anyone who enjoys the stories of real spies in the 19th century will find themselves sucked in.

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	Deborah McDonald Personal site Deborah McDonald is an English author who specializes in biographies, first writing Clara Collet, 1860-1948 and The Prince, His Tutor and the Ripper. Most recently, she published the biography of Russia's most seductive spy, Moura Budberg.
	Jeremy Dronfield Personal site Jeremy Dronfield is an author hailing from Wales who, amongst other things, earned himself a doctorate in archaeology at Cambridge. His first novel, The Locust Farm, was shortlisted for the John Creasy Memorial Award.