We are bringing them all back home: it is not just recent emigrants who are returning to Ireland, but the dead, the lost, the long-ago disappeared — their ghosts are being repatriated one by one. This is a necessary task. So deep was the shame of emigration that, for many generations, we never dared to ask what really happened to them, once they were gone.

In 1890, May Duignan left the family farm in County Longford, on the night that her mother was giving birth to her fifth child. She took with her the household savings, with which she bought, in Liverpool, fine clothes and a cabin passage to America. Even at 19, May was not one to go steerage. She had a great sense of herself and she never lost it. This is what kept her going through all her adventures and if — like many wayward women — she slipped into poverty and abjection, her descent was slow enough and better fun than most.

For much of her life, May made her living as a “badger”, a robber-prostitute who fleeced rich clients, of which there was no shortage in the boom towns of Chicago and New York. Nuala O’Faolain, quite rightly, fails to see the glamorous side of the sex industry. A Chicago prostitute would service an average of 26 men a night, at 50 cents a pop, and she would pocket 25 cents. Her professional lifespan would be no more than five years.

This, then, is what happened to girls who were not met off the boat. As it happens, the Irish in Chicago rated lowest of all ethnic and racial groups for “crimes against chastity”, probably because strong family networks were already in place when they arrived. But May had betrayed and left her family. She had recourse to an uncle’s house in Nebraska, but “she did not like it there”. She was strong-willed, sexualised and already looking for a great, bad time.

Her first husband was Dal Churchill, “a robber, highwayman, safe-cracker, cattle rustler, and general all-round crook” who spent much of their marriage on the run. He was, she claims, lynched by a pious mob near Phoenix. A stint as a chorus girl netted her another one — a middle class misfit called Jim Sharp who might have made a respectable woman out of her if he hadn’t been, at a guess, psychotic. After a year of bizarre domesticity, she left his nice house and his nice mother and went back to her life of crime.

May considered herself a cut above whoredom by virtue of being a robber, independent of bully boy or madam. She occasionally scored huge amounts of cash from her clients — who, we must assume, were pretty drunk when she dipped them — although the money was as soon made as gone. May drank, too, of course. She had a drinker’s hard neck and a drinker’s sense of the grandiose. And, like many swashbuckling women, she needed a man to run with her, outdrink her and brawl with her when the drinking was done.

The great, doomed love of her life was a man called Eddie Guerin, who brought her to Paris in order to blow up the American Express Office safe. They were caught on the boat train back to Calais — at least Eddie was; May pretended not to know him, and went on to London with the loot. She came back, however, to stand by him through his trial, and served four years’ hard labour for her pains. Guerin was sent to Devil’s Island, and was one of the few men ever to escape it. He did so with money that May scraped together after her release. Once she had it sent to him, “I got me some extra nice fine linen and filled my purse to overflowing. Then I went home.” O’Faolain relishes the scene: this grand, disgraceful object walking the streets of her home town. “It forced the community to a first conscious, collective exercise in ambiguity,” the kind at which Irish communities have always excelled. She also knows the sadness of it, how we can never go back to the place in our heads. “Disappointment is itself a dry experience. The words you find for it . . . are no more than perfunctory.”

Eddie Guerin finally made it as far as London but May was unfortunately obliged to take a pot shot at him, for which crime she was sent to prison again. After 10 years, she was returned to America suffering from malnutrition. Her life went downhill at speed and she reached bottom, handcuffed to a hospital bed in Detroit. It was here that she was, in the best of narrative traditions, saved, by a reforming policeman who urged her to “write it all down”.

O’Faolain herself has writtten two riveting memoirs, so she knows how writing your life story can be a redeeming yet strangely hollow act. She has great respect for May’s account, Chicago May, Her Story: A Human Document by the Queen of Crooks, and she refuses to fictionalise the woman who wrote it: “That would be as bad as if a woman climbed out of a grave and brushed the clay from her mouth and spoke, and I substituted my own words for hers.” Instead she accompanies the reader through May’s words, imagining, wondering, questioning; trying somehow to “know” the woman who wrote them down.

One of the last questions she asks is whether May “enjoyed living”, as she claimed to do. How, she asks, could a woman whose life was based on the “brutish, debilitating work” of prostitution claim to enjoy anything? The question is, in itself, a little sad.

For many years, May managed to have a pretty good time. She travelled widely, dressed well and smiled at judges and juries with notable ease. She fell in love. She was famous. She had, or thought she had, some power. “Opening a woman’s body to a stranger,” O’Faolain writes, “is as grossly physical an event as being shot to death.” Perhaps this is true — but at least May Duignan managed, in her long afterlife, to raise a little hell.

THE STORY OF CHICAGO MAY by Nuala O’Faolain
M Joseph £16.99 pp307

Anne Enright is the author of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Vintage). The Story of Chicago May is available at the Books First price of £15.29 on 0870 165 8585

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