There’s a great deal of pleasantry and hardship in the life of a person who lives on an island like this that no one knows about except one who has lived here - going to bed at night with little food and rising again at the first chirp of the sparrow, then harrowing away at the world and maybe having no life worth talking about after doing our very best. “The most of my life I’ve spent on this lonely rock in the middle of the great sea. Other favourites: Anne Enright and Paula Meehan Peig Sayers spoke for generations of poor, uneducated Irish women who never had the opportunity to speak for themselves. Though much of what she described was unrelenting hardship, she was, by all accounts, pragmatic and cheerful in the face of it. Elegant prose it isn’t, but there are few authors with a more authentically Irish voice. It doesn’t matter to me that she didn’t place her own words down on paper, for this is only one element in the process of writing. Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. I didn’t study Peig in school I was not scarred by its misery at a tender age, which surely puts me in a more objective position than most to argue that Sayers’ account of life on the Great Blasket Island remains relevant and significant. Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literaturethe 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. They produced a bottle and within a short time. There are plenty of arguments against the inclusion of Sayers in the canon of great Irish women writers, foremost being the fact that she was illiterate in the language she spoke and instead dictated her famously bleak biography, as well as the hundreds of folk stories she contributed to the Irish Folklore Commission. In Chapter 14 of the account of her life, Peig tells us of a night when three men unknown to either herself or her father came through the door.
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