Dora d'Istria, pen name of Duchess Helena Koltsova-Massalskaya, born Elena Ghica (Gjika) (22 January 1828 in Bucharest – 17 November 1888 in Florence), was a Romanian Romantic writer and feminist.

She was an accomplished writer, fluent in multiple languages including Romanian, Italian, German, French, Latin, Ancient and Modern Greek, and Russian.

Her writings covered a wide range of topics, including monastic life, descriptions of countries and cultures, women's emancipation, historical narratives, and more.

[1] She received a thorough education that was continued abroad – first in Dresden, then in Vienna, then in Venice, and finally in Berlin where she gave a sample of her mastery of Ancient Greek to Alexander Von Humboldt.

They lived for several years in Russia, mostly in Saint Petersburg, but Dora never cherished the Russian nationalist views of her husband or the Eastern Orthodox bigotry of the Court of the Despotic Emperor Nicholas I.

She also published the narrative Au bord des lacs helvétiques ("Sailing the Swiss Lakes") (Geneva 1861), the novels Fylétia e Arbenoré prèj Kanekate laoshima (Livorno 1867) and Gli Albanesi in Rumenia, a history of her own family the dukes of Ghica from the 17th to the 19th century (2.

ed., Paris 1877), as well as numerous writings on literary history, poetics, political social and religious questions, history, art and more in renowned journals including the French Revue des Deux Mondes, the Belgian Libre Recherche, and the Italian Diritto, Antologia nuova, Rivista europea and more, as well as various Swiss, Greek, Romanian, and American journals.

Her family's history and fame, as well as its putative Albanian origins, are mostly known to the Western readers from Princess Elena Ghica's memoirs Gli Albanesi in Rumenia.

For Dora d'Istria (Elena Ghica's pen name), the crumbly theory of the Albanian origin of the family's founder, resurrected after several centuries of latent existence, proved to be very lucrative; it gave a new reason for her Romantic involvement in the Balkan people's emancipation struggle (she had previously adopted – and later abandon – a Hellenophile attitude courtesy of her Greek maternal ancestry and the influence of her Greek tutor Gregorios Pappadopoulos), as well as in her anti-establishment attitude generated by the entrenching of the Hohenzollern in the Romanian Principality to the detriment of her family who had high hopes for a return on the throne.

At the end of the century another member of her family, Romanian writer and socialite Albert Ghica, would likewise encourage vocal demands for the Albanian throne.