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Women That Left Their Mark Throughout History

Khalid Elhassan August 4, 2020 34 min

13. The Dark Lady of Doona

Rockfleet Castle, one of Grace O’Malley’s strongholds. Wikimedia

In 1546, Grace O’Malley was married. She bore three children, before her husband was killed in an ambush in 1565. Because of the era’s sexist laws, she was unable to inherit her husband’s property. So she became a pirate, settling in Clare Island and making it her stronghold and base of operations. She began her piratical career with three galleys and a number of smaller boats, using them to prey on shipping and raid coastal targets.

While seething over the laws that deprived her of her husband’s property, and building up her pirate fleet, Grace consoled herself by taking as a lover a shipwrecked sailor. When her lover was killed by a rival family, the MacMahons, history got its first glimpse of Grace O’Malley’s ferocity. To avenge her lover, she attacked Doona castle, where her lover’s murderers were holed up, and killed them. That earned her a badass nickname: “The Dark Lady of Doona“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.