This book would be a very important book in Irish history and was required reading for many years in secondary schools in Ireland. Máire was a schoolteacher from Dublin and she edited the manuscript. She would eventually dictate many folk stories and legend to Seosamh Ó DálaighĪlthough Peig was illiterate in the Irish language, she dictated her biography to her son Micheál, who in turn sent it to Máire Ní Chinnéide. People would gather at Peig’s house in the evenings to listen to her stories in front of the fire. They had eleven children together, six of whom survived. Peig got married to Pádraig Ó Guithín, who was from the Great Blasket Island, in 1892 and moved there with him. Her plan was to join her friend Cáit in America but Cáit was unable to send Peig the price of the fare. Her father, Tomás, was a storyteller and passed stories on to Peig.Īfter leaving school at the age of 12, Peig went to work as a servant. She was an Irish author and seanchaí (traditional Gaelic storyteller). All her surviving children except Mchel emigrated to the United States to live with their descendants in Springfield, Massachusetts. She is buried in the Dn Chaoin Burial Ground, Corca Dhuibhne, Ireland. She was remembered by one of the nuns there as 'very stately and very dignified. She was moved to a hospital in Dingle, County Kerry where she died in 1958. After a bad fall in the late 1940s, her health deteriorated, and she spent the last eight years of her life in the Dingle Hospital. Yours, etc.,Patricia Coughlan,Department of English,University College Cork.Peig Sayers was born in Vicarstown, Dunquin, Co. Peig, her son and her brother-in-law went back to live near Vicarstown on the mainland at the end of 1941.
This distinction seems to have been lost upon Fr Moore. Thus I claim my right and that of others to make a feminist reading of all and any work, as distinct from labeling it as itself "feminist", which in the case of Peig's work I have never done. But to withhold one's own responses to a work, in all their difference from it, is to enshrine it in a glass case like a dead specimen (a process, alas, carried out over the generations by the deployment of an edited version of Peig to adolescents as an ideal of Irish womanhood). But is it not precisely an "ideological reading", and one which in effect endorses the subjection of women in past times to the dispensations made by patriarchal communities on their behalf, which leads him so to cherish the romantic first account of Peig's made match to a total stranger? Finally, as for what Fr Moore calls "inappropriate" readings, I can only reiterate that tact and sympathetic imagination are required in approaching the writing of other times and places. Fr Moore writes in the tone of one blithely confident of his own freedom from "ideological reading". If so, I would point out that, to borrow a phrase of his own, it is "a cardinal principle in literary criticism", as indeed in all other forms of intellectual inquiry, to be aware of all the relevant data.My second point is in the form of a question, and arises out of the first. Perhaps Fr Moore does so feel, or perhaps he was simply unaware of the existence of the second. I for one would not feel secure in privileging one of these accounts over the other. Finally she describes with much circumstantial detail how their match was made, according to contemporary custom, in a Dingle pub, by their relatives and friends and in their own presence. She mentions being told of his interest in her by another island woman, and stresses how they had felt a strong mutual attraction. In the third, Beatha Pheig Sayers, Peig tells at length in Chapters 1618 how she had several times seen her future husband Peatsai "Flint" O Gaoithin on his visits to the mainland. There are, of course, three volumes of her life-story, not one. I feel I must enlighten Fr Moore as to the existence of another and totally different account of the matter, also given by Peig. Rev Pat Moore (April 21st) cites a passage about Peig's response to the match made for her in "the account of her life", in which he approvingly emphasises Peig's willing obedience to her fate in being married off to someone she had never seen before the match was made. Sir, - I have three brief final points to make about Peig Sayers and how we read her work.