The photograph is startling. A woman of ample dimensions squares up to a tough-looking boxer. The time, it is agreed, is 1901, but is this photo, which supposedly shows Polly Burns, the "Women's World Boxing Champion", sparring with Commonwealth champion Frankie Welsh in 1901, part of an elaborate fiction or does it reflect the true story of an extraordinary life?
My Great-Grandmother Was A Boxer, the documentary in RTE 1's True Lives slot on Monday night, follows Dubliner Catherine Morley as she tries to piece together the facts about her great-grandmother Polly who - family legend has it - was a professional boxer at the turn of the century. Mixing interviews, archive footage and dramatic reconstructions, the film is the story of the search for an elusive truth.
"Any life is complex, especially when it's being pieced together from fragments of newspapers," says Adrian Lynch of Graph Films, the makers of the documentary. "There's no doubt that, because Polly was a woman boxer, her life wasn't written about - so in a sense we are bringing her back into history. There is that question of our father's and grandfathers' histories being known to us, but of women's lives being invisible."
Born in 1881, Polly Burns came from an old Lancashire circus family. Her mother died in a trapeze act, and her father remarried into the "famous fighting Fairclough family". In addition to her pugilistic career, Polly was known as a strong woman - "the lady who held up donkeys with her teeth".
She started fighting in booths at fairs at the age of 16. "She was one of the few women at the time who fought men," Lynch says. "She made thousands out of it." Not without some cost, though - her front teeth were knocked out by a sailor in Ipswich.
In 1900, she travelled to Paris to fight the US women's champion, Texas Mamie Donovan. Texas Mamie failed to show up, so Polly was declared world champion.
When she married Dubliner Tommy Lynch, she moved to Dublin, where she gave birth to two daughters, one of them Catherine Morley's grandmother Agnes. After the marriage broke down, Polly left Ireland again to fight - she was the only woman to box in the National Sporting Club, where she fought Tommy Burns, who she went on to marry - surely one of the more unusual romantic stories of the century.
"People think that women's boxing is a new thing, but that's not the case," says Lynch. "The first recorded bout was between a fishmonger and an aristocrat in 1727. So there is a strange, other history that's being going on all the time.
"A lot of the respected experts, especially the male ones, don't believe Polly was a fighter. At the end of her life, living in poverty in Dublin, she sold her story to the British tabloids and a lot of the information about her comes from those tabloid stories - so the question is, did she make up material for them? We've found a lot of evidence that she didn't." Among the circumstantial witnesses interviewed is Barbara Buttrick, president of the Women's World Boxing Federation in Miami, who was a booth boxer herself and had heard of Polly while she herself was on the circuit.
Boxing experts, social historians and contemporary women boxers all contribute to the film, which includes some extraordinary archive footage of women's boxing found in the unclassified section of Pathe Film's archives.
My Great-Grandmother Was A Boxer is an engaging piece of work, evoking the almost disappeared world of the fair and the carnival, places of illusion and trickery, where the rules of ordinary society were often suspended. Looking at us from these faded photographs, Polly Burns seems both solid and rakish, a fascinating but elusive character. The film's playfulness and knowingness consciously reflects Polly's own life on the margins of the entertainment and sporting worlds, Lynch accepts.
"We like the idea that the story is potentially not true. With Polly, it's very hard to separate the myth from reality, because her reality is in other people's interpretation of her, which is interesting because this film and these newspaper reports continue that on again. So she keeps being reborn in the media. People will write about her and speak about her again, and the question still remains: is it true?"
My Great-Grandmother Was A Boxer is on RTE 1 on Monday at 8 p.m.