Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman

by Sharon Gmelch

Book Overview

This book tells the life history of Nan, an Irish Traveller & details how their culture was able to maintain a separate identity from the mainstream Irish population for at least 200 years.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393023311
• ISBN13: 9780393023312
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 239 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Amazing Life of an Irish Traveler

This book gave me an amazing view of an Irish Traveler. It tells how the children were raised and how they slept and cooked. It explained why the farmers' wives bought the things the travelers were selling. It tells of the good times and the bad. When Nan was old and lived in a house she felt closed in and not happy. I could see why she would have gotten a tent and lived on the side of the road, if possible. This book also explains how times have changed and changed the life of a traveler.

Nan is haunting

The author not only spent the time to do a very well researched, insightful book about The Travelling Community and Nan in particular, but she managed to bring Nan to life with her own words as well as the author's observations. Nan becomes as haunting a presence as her photograph on the cover promises. Somehow Sharon Gmelch managed to be both personal AND objective in her telling of Nan's life.

Stripped of sentimentality, harsh reality conveyed

Sharon Gmelch's work, published originally in 1986, emerged from her anthropological doctoral studies conducted along with her husband George's concurrent work into the urbanisation of the travellers. She enters Nan's tales delicately, bringing you as a reader in and out of Nan's anecdotes occasionally before taking again the thread of her long and detailed recollections of a life spent largely outside the confines of city life, but, it is to be noted, increasingly becoming settled within the urban life that takes over for millions of Irish in the latter part of the 20th c., from whatever rural background or tradition. The highlights of this account I found were in her service for Major Evans at Gretton House in Northants. In this quintessentially British country home, she worked her way up from being a kitchen maid, and her vignettes capture movingly her ability to, being illiterate, to live by her wits. Her subsequent return to Ireland, one senses, was not wished for, even though it brought her back to her traveller lifestyle. For her childhood, as with too many of her own 18 children, she shows how elastic the bonds are between parents and offspring (despite the often asserted claim that for travellers family ties come first), as some of her own children found themselves sent off to institutions to be raised. The most intriguing section next was how she met her match in trying to survive as a totally untutored fortune-teller in 1940s Conamara, since she could only barter her wares rather than be paid for them from women as poor as she was! After that, the weariness of surviving wears her down into a much older-looking woman than she was when Gmelch met her in the 1970s. Abusive husbands, unending pregnancies, exhausting hustles, and life spent on the road or in substandard housing left her wiped out. Drink and violence--at one point she casually gives as an aside the fact her husband broke her nose--belie the carefree proto-hippie romanticism that rose-tinted a harsh, gray, and lonely life. (No index and a lack of detailed notes cut this book down a star, however). A good follow-up is Gmelch's 1976 general account, Tinkers and Travellers, which documents Nan's testimony and that of others, often camped at Holylands near Dublin. George Gmelch wrote a more theoretical, less engaging study of the Travellers, and Jane Helleiner offers more recent scholarly work from 2001.

Review of Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman

I have used this book several times in anthropology classes I teach and this coming fall I am going to use it again. I think of it as a classic because it addresses so many important aspects of a good life history. First, it represents the everyday life of a person living in poverty, an area worthy of academic study. It is also a close study of how women are sometimes, and in some societal situations, subject to abuse and have little recourse. Then, this study is also an interesting look at how historical changes influence the lives of people, in this case the travellers who used to make their living as tin smiths and horse traders and are now forced to adapt to an urban and highly technical world. The book is beautifully written and has always been well received by students

A well-written story about a fascinating destiny

This books gives an excellent insight in the life-style of the Irish travellers, as well as it is an enjoyable read. The main character, Nan, is a woman from a travelling family, living like nomads in the developping Ireland that is becoming more and more modern around them. Her life is very harsh, and harsher than the normal life of a travelling person, as the author points out. Nonetheless, or maybe just because of that, it is a gripping story and its contains are very interesting. You don't only get a good read, you also get a good and interesting lesson in the subsociety of the Irish travellers, a group that to a large extent maintains their nomadic lifestyle up to this day.