Like Socrates, she never wrote down a word. I’ve been thinking about varying degrees of detachment recently, particularly in terms of femininity and womanhood and specifically with regard to resoldering the links by reading more women, to forge new bonds with femininity and weave the threads of a female genealogy. I will leave the stories from that island for you to hear through the voice of the great story-teller. He brother arranged her marriage to a man from one of the Blasket islands. And it was a future that saw major upheaval in Ireland, the seeds of which were sown in the unrest she describes so well. The important issues of the day - memories of the famine that her parents endured and the ethics of stealing food to stay alive, the Land League, evictions, and emigration - are all interwoven into the life of a young girl as she looks to the future. She remembered that theft years later when she was seventeen on her return home after four years in service in Dingle. When she stole a piece of sweet cake from an old woman in a smoke-filled cottage she knew, as she said, that Someone was watching. It is so poignant and emotionally touching to go back to 1877 and read of a little four year old girl who can't wait to get to school so that she can have her own book filled with coloured pictures. It really needs to be read in Irish, using this translation for reference if you need it, and then the distant voice of your Irish identity will come to you from nearly 150 years ago. I loved it when I studied for the Leaving Cert in 1967 and I still love it.
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