Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman - Softcover

Sharon Gmelch

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881336025 ISBN 13: 9780881336023

Publisher: Waveland Pr Inc, 1991

Synopsis

Nan Donohoe was an Irish Travelling woman, one of Ireland's indigenous gypsies or "tinkers." Traditionally, they traveled the countryside making and repairing tinware, sweeping chimneys, selling small household wares, and doing odd-job work. Today, they live on the roadside in trailers and in government-built camps. Told largely in her own voice, Nan's saga begins in 1919 with her birth in a tent in the Irish Midlands; it follows her life in Ireland and England, in countryside and city slums, through adversity and adventure. Gmelch brings to her task not only the resources of anthropology, but the skill of a sensitive writer and a warmth that allows her to see Nan as a person, not a subject. What emerges is a human story, filled with cruelty and compassion, sorrow and humor, bad luck and good.

Titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Arensberg, The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study (ISBN 9780881334012); Sutherland, Gypsies: The Hidden Americans (ISBN 9780881332353); and Yoors, The Gypsies (ISBN 9780881333053).

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Ireland's tinkers or "Travellers," pariahs in their own land, are a sociological anomaly, fast disappearing in contemporary Ireland. In 1971 Gmelch, a New York professor of anthropology, took up residence in Holylands, an official campsite set up outside Dublin by the government to keep tinkers off the roads. She moved there to become better acquainted with Nan, a Traveller born in 1919 in a tent in the Irish midlands. Nan's oral history, her self-described "awful mixup of a life," takes us into the Travellers' periods of pleasant, patched-together domesticity that are inevitably shattered by violence and marital crises, usually precipitated by drink. Nan's marriages, her 18 children, the shocking physical abuse perpetrated by one husband, did not break her, and even allowed her a little happiness. Nan's story provides a unique perspective on 20th century Irish history. Photographs not seen by PW.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Nan Donohoe's life story is told, most ly in her own words, as representative of the native Irish gypsies known as travellers, or tinkers. It is a story of the will to survive despite poverty, disease, illiteracy, abuse, and well-intentioned but ineffective bureaucratic interfer ence. For generations these itinerants peddled wares and services to the rural populace. After World War II, with mass produced goods and machinery readily available to farmers, their means of livelihood vanished and they began to camp nearer urban centers, causing great social problems. They are now mostly in government camps and receiving welfare because assimilation into the mainstream appears impossi ble. Similarities with the migrant farm worker in the United States abound. For specialist and lay reader alike. Sondra Brunhumer, Western Michigan Univ. Libs., Kalamazoo
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Waveland Pr Inc
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0881336025
• ISBN 13: 9780881336023
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 239