# Jean Overton Fuller

'Jean Violet Overton Fuller (7 March 1915 – 8 April 2009) was a British author, poet, mystic, and painter. She is best known for her book Madeleine, the biography of Noor Inayat Khan, an Allied Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent during the Second World War who was executed after being captured by the Germans. She wrote additional books about SOE, bringing to light some of the failures of the organization in France during World War II.

## Early Life

Fuller was born in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire on 7 March 1915, the posthumous and only child of an Indian Army officer killed in World War I. Brought up to think for herself by her mother, who was an artist, and a grandfather who was a retired Army doctor she early developed a wide field of interests. Following a short-lived career as a repertory actress she studied phonetics, linguistics and astronomy, and graduated with honours from the University of London. In the 1930s she became a member of the poetry circle of Victor Benjamin Neuburg, whose biography she later wrote. During the Second World War, she was employed by the British Postal Censorship Office in London. Later, in 1947–8, she studied at the Académie Julian in Paris.
Author Sarah Helm described Fuller in 1949 as "a petite young woman with short, cropped auburn hair and a plain but pleasant face."

## SOE books

With the end of World War II in 1945, former SOE agents wrote books about their experiences and accounts appeared in movies and magazines. The emphasis of the publicity, fostered by SOE's former leaders Maurice Buckmaster and Vera Atkins, was on heroics and the tragedy of agents who were executed by the Germans. Unknown to the public were the blunders, often fatal to SOE agents and SOE operations, until Fuller published books on SOE in the 1950s. Fuller was skeptical of government secrecy, dating back to when the British government concealed details about the death of her father.
Fuller was a friend and neighbor of Noor and of the Inayat Khan family. Noor Inayat Khan's work during World War II was commemorated by the award to her of a posthumous George Medal in 1949. Later that year, Fuller travelled extensively throughout Europe, interviewing people connected with Noor and the SOE, including a former German interrogator of Noor, Ernest Vogt, who she identified only as "Ernest." The resultant book, Madeleine, published by Victor Gollancz Ltd. in 1952, was re-published in 1988 by East-West Publications in Rotterdam. This updated version contains some chapters that were removed from the original manuscript, such as an in-depth exploration of Tipu Sultan, Noor's ancestor. Until the publication of Shrabani Basu's Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan (Sutton Publishing, 2006), Fuller's book was considered to be the definitive biography of Noor Inayat Khan.
Following Madeleine's publication, Fuller continued extensive research into the history of the wartime SOE French networks, interviewing many of the people involved – British and French, as well as Germans – in order to discover who was responsible for betraying Noor and her fellow agents. Her results were published in the 1958 book Double Webs (Putnam & Co).

## Other works

In 1970 Fuller founded the publishing firm Fuller d'Arch Smith together with Timothy d'Arch Smith. The company employed the poet and writer Martin Booth as Poetry Editor. In 1974 Booth was instrumental in finding Fuller a house in Wymington, which became the company's new registered office. Prior to this she had been living in a flat in Whitfield Street, North Soho.
Fuller also wrote several other biographies, notably of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Sir Francis Bacon, Victor Neuburg and a book detailing her theory of Jack the Ripper's true identity as Walter Richard Sickert, an English painter. Jean Overton Fuller's memoirs were published in 2007 by Michael Russell, Wilby, Norwich under the title Driven To It, An Autobiography.

## Later life

She died in Kettering on 8 April 2009 at the age of 94.