In his lifetime, just four people managed to launch successful assassination attempts against Benito Mussolini, the infamous fascist dictator who brought Italy into World War II and inspiredAdolf Hitler.

Of those four, just one—Anglo-Irish woman Violet Gibson—ever came close to succeeding. The 50-year-old made headlines on April 7, 1926, when she fired on Mussolini and almost altered the course of history forever. But in the years after her bold attack, Gibson was consigned to an asylum, and her story was all but forgotten.

Nearly a century later, Gibson’s home country of Ireland is hoping to belatedly recognize her legacy, reports Orla Barry for public radio program the World. The Dublin City Council recently passed a motion giving initial approval for the installation of a plaque in Gibson’s honor. As Michael Sheils McNamee writes for BBC News, officials are considering her childhood home in the Merrion Square neighborhood of Dublin as a potential location for the memorial.

Gibson’s story first attracted international attention in 2014, when journalist Siobhán Lynam produced a major radio documentary that brought her remarkable life to a wider audience. Listeners can now access the documentary online for free through Irish broadcaster RTÉ’s website.

Lynam’s radio program drew on The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, a 2010 book by British historian Frances Stonor Saunders. Per BBC News, the journalist’s husband, Barrie Dowdall, is currently screening a documentary based on Gibson’s life at international film festivals.

Born in 1876, Gibson hailed from a wealthy family headed by her father, Lord Ashbourne, a senior judicial figure in Ireland. As a young woman, notes Michael Murphy for the Irish Post, she served as a debutante in the court of Queen Victoria.

Growing up between Dublin and London, Gibson was a sickly child who suffered from physical and mental illness—what was then termed “hysteria,” per the Irish Post. In her mid-20s, she converted to Catholicism; later, she moved to Paris to work for pacifist organizations. According to the World, Gibson’s passionate political and religious beliefs drove her to attempt to murder the Italian dictator in April 1926.

On the day of the shooting, Mussolini had just finished giving a speech to a conference of surgeons in Rome.[…]

Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), pictured on May 13, 1926, with a bandaged nose—the result of Gibson’s April 7 assassination attempt (Topical Press Agency / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)