Sonia Vagliano Eloy was a French lieutenant in the Free French Army during WWII. She received the Bronze Star and the Croix de Guerre and was made an officer of the Légion d’Honneur. Her memoir, Les Demoiselles De Gaulle (Plon), is based on the daily diary entries kept during her service and the letters she had written home.
Martha Noel Evans, the translator, is a retired French and women studies professor and former director of book publications at the Modern Language Association. She is the author of Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France (Cornell) and Masks of Tradition: Women and the Politics of Writing in Twentieth-Century France (Cornell), and translated Léon Chertok and Isabelle Stengers’ A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier To Lacan (Stanford).