Grace O'Malley, Princess and Pirate by Robert Machray

Gráinne Ní Mháille, anglicised as Grace O'Malley and remembered in Irish as Granuaile, was born around 1530 into a seafaring family on the Mayo coast. She commanded ships, levied tolls on vessels using her waters, married twice and outlived both husbands, was imprisoned and released, and in 1593 sailed to Greenwich to negotiate face to face with Elizabeth I. They had no language in common and the meeting went through translators. She got what she came for.

Robert Machray published this novel in 1898. It is a full-blooded Victorian adventure: sea fights, sieges, a shipwrecked narrator, and a heroine who is by turns chieftain, captain and diplomat.

It is also framed as something it is not. The whole book is narrated by one Ruari Macdonald, a Scot of the Clandonald driven out of Islay and taken into her service, who tells the story as his own memory. That is a literary device of the period and nothing more. Macdonald never existed, and no manuscript lies behind the novel.

The device works on a Victorian reader and misleads a modern one, because Grace O'Malley herself was real and much of what surrounds her here is not. So this edition adds what Machray did not supply: a note on the historical record, setting out what the documents actually establish. The Tudor state papers record her in some detail, and the eighteen Articles of Interrogatory that Elizabeth's government put to her in 1593, together with her answers, survive. They are a remarkable document in their own right, and the closest thing we have to her own account of herself: the Crown required her to answer for her parentage, her marriages, her children and how she had lived since her husbands died, and wrote down what came back. The note sets out what they establish and points a reader to them; it does not quote them, because a quotation printed here would have to be checked against the manuscript.

The novel is printed as Machray wrote it. Nothing has been cut or modernised, and the note is kept separate from the text so that a reader can take the story on its own terms and then find out where it parts from the record.