Female Pirate Fiction

[breacanfeile]

Hello,

I just wanted to announce that I have written two out of three Scottish historical fiction novels with a female pirate captain as the main character (Ocean Eyes and Man of God). Captain Angelique is very rough-and-tumble, as I didn't believe any woman pirate would be sexy and wear lip gloss. I did not write these books to be romance novels; they are swashbuckling stories like the Three Musketeers. The third book, Order of the Cross, will be available within a few months and I will be at the Key West Pirates in Paradise Festival for a booksigning this year.

I am also interested in starting a topic of discussion about Scottish fiction as it relates to pirates, as well as believable pirate women in fiction and film (as there are not very many). If anyone would like to visit my website, it's at www.pirateangel.com.

Amy Hoff

[Iron Bess]

If'n your going to ply your wears you ought to introduce yerself lass first if nothing else.

A crew is more apt to leand an ear to a body they know!

Go to the initiation ristes and pub management heaading and buy a round. We tend to listen better if'n we be a mite drunk.

Welcome lass....

[breacanfeile]

Well, the rounds are bought, everyone English has slid beneath the table as they can't handle the Scotch...so I will continue on my original course of asking about believable pirate women.

-Amy Hoff

[Red Bess]

I don't know much about Scottish pirates, per se, but I'm keenly interested in believeable women pirates. The story I'm working on is about Anne Bonny (OK, she's Irish....). I've read a couple fiction books based on Anne Bonny's life (Sea Star, a romance novel, and Mistress of the Seas, more a fictionalized biography) and they have believable and not-so-believable moments. Both books are well researched, that's apparent. But they both have a pat ending, with Anne finding true love and settling down. Now, the premise of my story is that, after she disappeared from a Jamaican prison around 1721, she did not go back to the colonies or Ireland and live a low-key life. She found her own crew (consisting of several women) and went back to a life of piracy under an alias. So I need to create a somewhat new Anne Bonny, perhaps a wee bit older and wiser and certainly more in control of her destiny than she was when she sailed with Jack Rackham. And the women she finds for her crew -- I need to make their stories believable, too.

So I ask: why would an early 18th-century women take to a life of piracy?

[breacanfeile]

Aloha-

In the books I've published, the main character is a French and Scottish noble, Captain Angelique NicDonald d'Autevielle. Her father believes women should be trained in combat, as during the time period, many Scottish and Irish women were trained to fight as a matter of course. It's a long, drawn-out list of reasons, but it was planted in her mind at a very young age that women could fight. There are many reasons; women were not as subservient or one-sided as history would have you think!

-Amy Hoff