PDF PEIG SAYERS AUTOBIOGRAPHY SERIES

He then sent the manuscript pages to Máire Ní Chinnéide in Dublin, who edited them for publication. Peig was illiterate in the Irish language, having received her early schooling through the medium of English.

In the 1930s a Dublin teacher, Máire Ní Chinnéide, who was a regular visitor to the Blaskets, urged Peig to tell her life story to her son Mícheál. He recorded them and brought them to the attention of the academic world. Flower was keenly appreciative of Peig Sayers' stories. The Norwegian scholar Carl Marstrander, who visited the island in 1907, urged Robin Flower of the British Museum to visit the Blaskets. She and Pádraig had eleven children, of whom six survived. Peig moved to the Great Blasket Island after marrying Pádraig Ó Guithín, a fisherman and native of the island, on 13 February 1892. She had expected to join her best friend Cáit Boland in America, but Cáit wrote that she had had an accident and could not forward the cost of the fare. She spent the next few years as a domestic servant working for members of the growing middle class produced by the Land War. She spent two years there before returning home due to illness. At the age of 12, she was taken out of school and went to work as a servant for the Curran family in the nearby town of Dingle, where she said she was well treated. Her father Tomás Sayers was a renowned storyteller who passed on many of his tales to Peig. She was called Peig after her mother, Margaret 'Peig' Brosnan, from Castleisland. Despite, or perhaps because of, being written in halting English, Eibhlís’ letters have an intense, poetic appeal, becoming increasingly elegiac in tone as she records and laments the relentless decline of the Island’s population.īesides the correspondence with George Chambers, she kept a diary in Irish over the years, making many detailed observations about the social life of the Islanders.She was born Máiréad Sayers in the townland of Vicarstown, Dunquin, County Kerry, the youngest child of the family. The letters are unique in the context of Blasket literature, not least for being written in English, very much a second language for Eibhlís. The letters span her early adult life on the Island and the first decade of her life on the mainland, to which she moved with her family in 1942. The selection draws on the lengthy correspondence Eibhlís maintained with an English visitor to the Island, George Chambers, between 19.

PDF PEIG SAYERS AUTOBIOGRAPHY SERIES

In 1950 he was drowned while swimming near Galway.Ĭhiefly remembered as the author of a remarkable series of letters, a selection of which was published as Letters from the Great Blasket (1978). The book’s success encouraged Muiris to take up writing full-time, but a second volume of autobiography and a novel were rejected by successive publishers. The English translation, published the same year by Thomson and Moya Llewellyn Davies, quickly established it as an international classic of autobiographical writing. The result, Twenty Years a-Growing, was acclaimed nationally on its publication in 1933. It was the success of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s autobiographical book The Islandman, combined with the encouragement of his friend George Thomson, that prompted Muiris to undertake his own account of his formative years on the Blaskets. He was greatly aided in this by his grandfather, Eoghan (Daideo) Ó Súilleabháin, a gifted storyteller who developed a great affection for the boy. When he rejoined his family on the Island he spoke only English, but quickly became fluent in Irish.

But he steadily improved his writing abilities until he was able to produce his two best known works Allagar na hInise (1928), and An tOileánach (1929), in his own hand.Īs works of high literary merit coming out of an oral culture, they are triumphs of determination to master the written word – to leave a record, as he wrote in the closing lines of An tOileánach, ‘of what life was like in my time and the neighbours that lived with me’.įollowing the death of his mother, Muiris spent the first six years of his life in Dingle. His first major book, Seanchas ón Oileán Tiar, published in 1956, was dictated to Robin Flower. He received great encouragement from the scholars Carl Marstrander and Robin Flower and later as editors from Brian Ó Ceallaigh and Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha. Having been taught to write only English in school, he was faced in his middle years with the challenge of learning to write in his native Irish in order to record the life and history of his people. A farmer and fisherman, he lived all his life on the Island. Perhaps the greatest of the Island writers.

Pdf peig sayers autobiography