The books were not written down by Peig but were dictated to others. Sayers is most famous for her autobiography Peig ISBN 0-8156-0258-8, but also for the folklore and stories which were recorded in Machnamh Seanmhná/An Old Woman's Reflections, ISBN 978-0-19-281239-1. All her surviving children except Mícheál emigrated to the USA to live with their descendants in Springfield, Massachusetts. She is buried in the Dún Chaoin Burial Ground, Corca Dhuibhne, Ireland. ![]() She was moved to a hospital in Dingle, County Kerry where she died in 1958. She continued to live on the island until 1942, when she returned to her native place, Dunquin. ![]() Over several years from 1938 Peig dictated 350 ancient legends, ghost stories, folk stories, and religious stories to Seosamh Ó Dálaigh of the Irish Folklore Commission. 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. ![]() Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.40in - 0.50in - 0.She was born Máiréad Sayers in the townland of Vicarstown, Dunquin, County Kerry, the youngest child of the family.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 died in 1958, when she was 85. ![]() 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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