Grania has trouble finding other women who share her approach or her profession (honest trade with a little piracy on the side). There are no historical notes to inform the reader whether this, or any other scene, is based on fact.
One of the more interesting episodes concerns her release in response to the threat of an army of women dressed as warriors to frighten her captors. Tigernan must kill for her, and later she is imprisoned twice. Meanwhile, Grania's charisma ("I just went in the direction I chose, and when I looked back they were following me") makes enemies for her among the English. True love comes, temporarily, in the form of a poetic Welsh seaman washed up on her shore and finally, in a more permanent arrangement, with "fierce, funny" Tigernan, faithful liegeman since her childhood. Later, Grania helps herself to this second mate's ancestral castle and lands. Her first marriage, to an insensitive he-man, ends with his death in battle her second sounds less like happily-ever-after than a pursuit of harpiness. Still, Grace attracts lovers with the unique beauty of her "long stride and easy slouch and proud way. By the time she realized he would rather have had her "a female woman" with "the six womanly gifts: beauty of form, beauty of voice, sweet speech, skill with a needle, chastity, and female wisdom," she's too set in her habits to change.
With her "weathered face" and "splayed toes," her "large honesty and few pretensions," she came by her warrior ways trying to be the son she thought her father wanted. Grania is not your garden-variety heroine. It begins strikingly as a "tall and lean, taut-muscled" commander of an Irish merchant convoy heroically fights to save the burning flagship and its men - and turns out to be a woman. This mostly fictional story is presented by Morgan Llywelyn in six sections, five of which are named for her sexual partners.
Grania is Grainne Ni Mhaille, a 16th-century Irish chieftain, known as Grace O'Malley to the English, who had enough trouble with her that her name appears in a record or two from the reign of Elizabeth I.
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