The Only Woman in the Room
Vienna, 1933. Nineteen-year-old Hedwig Kiesler is the most talked-about young actress on the Austrian stage, courted at a charity ball by Friedrich Mandl, the country's most powerful munitions dealer. Their marriage looks like a fairy tale until Mandl, an early enthusiast for both Mussolini and Hitler, begins inviting fascist officers to dinner and forbids Hedy any privacy in their fortress estate. As the Anschluss approaches, Hedy carefully drugs her maid, slips out a window, and flees through Paris to Hollywood, where she reinvents herself as Hedy Lamarr. There, between studio films, she co-invents a frequency-hopping radio system meant to keep Allied torpedoes from being jammed, a patent that anticipates the spread-spectrum technology behind modern wireless networks. Marie Benedict's 2019 historical novel weaves Hedy's two lives into a single arc, paying overdue tribute to a glamorous woman the world refused to take seriously.
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What you might want to know about The Only Woman in the Room
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 1933 Vienna, nineteen-year-old stage actress Hedy Kiesler marries Austria's third-richest man, the munitions magnate Friedrich Mandl. From his dinner table she overhears Nazi weapons buyers, then escapes to London and Hollywood as Hedy Lamarr and works on a torpedo patent.
Yes. The Only Woman in the Room is fictionalized history of Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood actress who co-invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology that contributed to modern Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Marie Benedict researched her documented life extensively.
Yes. Marie Benedict has written numerous historical novels about real women, including The Other Einstein, Carnegie's Maid, Lady Clementine, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, and Her Hidden Genius. Each is a standalone.
The Only Woman in the Room was written by Marie Benedict, published in 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton.
The Only Woman in the Room is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Only Woman in the Room takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Only Woman in the Room is a standalone novel by Marie Benedict, not part of a series.
The Only Woman in the Room is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.