Peig had 11 children, six of which survived, all children emmigrated to the United States during the 1920's. There are some accounts of it being an arranged marriage while other accounts say she fell madly in love in him after seeing him on the island. She had no other choice but to return to work as a domestic servant.She returned home to Vicarstown in 1832 and married Pádraig Ó Gaoithín from the Great Blasket Island wurho was 12 years older than her on the 13th February. It was her wish to follow in the footsteps of her elder siblings and make the trip to America however the fare for her passage promised by her friend Cáit Boland never arrived. She was happy there however had to return home after 4 years due to illness. Her first job was a domestic servant in the nearby down of Dingle to the Curran family.
She attended the local National School until she was 14. Tomás was a small farmer and a storyteller himself. Peig was the youngest child of Tomás and Margaret Sayers and was one of 13 children. Despite not writing a single sentence, Peig dictated her recollections about life on the Great Blasket Island to her son Micheál Ó Guithín. These books together also show where all the ideas came from in the Poor Mouth which satirises this style of literature.Peig Sayers is one of Ireland's greatest storytellers. It well worth a read particularly if it is read along with The Islandman, Twenty Years a Growing and the Western Island. It shows what people did to make a living, entertainment, customs of birth, death, marriage, religion and much more. Peig's autobiography gives a fantastic insight into the lives of ordinary people in rural Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th century, in this case Na Blascaodaí - the Blascket Islands. Despite being an Irish learner, however, I decided to read it in English just in case and to save my Irish reading for more contemporary reading material! You can see why - it is exceptionally rural and old-fashioned and religion is present all through the text which many people felt associated Irish with all things backward looking and damaged the language.Ĭoming at it as someone from Scotland who didn't have to answer interpretation questions on it and who has a suitably positive and modern view of Irish and Scottish Gaelic (which I speak) I was able to take a more open-minded view on Peig. Generations of school children in Ireland had to read through Peig Sayer's autobiography as a set text in Irish language classes and many therefore hold a negative view of the book as I myself do with Shakespeare and other works of literature I had to study at school. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the "quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone." Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is-one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people. Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island. laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him." Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: "People will yet walk into the graveyard where I'll be lying I'll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished." Peig said of her son Tomás, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: "Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman's life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature-the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland's traditional storytellers.
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