The often bleak tone of the book is established from its opening words: Peig depicts the declining years of a traditional Irish-speaking way of life characterised by poverty, devout Catholicism, and folk memory of gang violence, the Great Hunger and the Penal Laws.
Parody of this type reached its zenith with Flann O'Brien's satire of An tOileánach, the novel An Béal Bocht ("The Poor Mouth"). The movement swiftly found itself the object of some derision and mockery – especially among the more cosmopolitan intellectual bourgeois of Ireland – for its often relentless depictions of rural hardship. Flaherty's documentary film Man of Aran address similar subjects. Tomás Ó Criomhthain's memoir an tOileánach ("the Islandman", 1929) and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin's Fiche Bliain ag Fás, and Robert J. Peig is among the most famous expressions of a late Gaelic Revival genre of personal histories by and about inhabitants of the Blasket Islands and other remote Irish locations. All her surviving children except Mícheál emigrated to the United States 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. She was also among the informants not comfortable with being recorded mechanically on the Ediphone, so the material had to be taken down on pen and paper. One matter of speculation is whether there were delicate material that a female informant such as she would have refrained from recounting to a male collector ( Irish Folklore Commission's policy being to hire only male collectors), though there was evidently close rapport established between the two individuals, which perhaps overrode such hypothetical barriers. 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 (while another source tallies 432 items collected by Ó Dálaigh from her, some 5,000 pages of material). 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. She was born Máiréad Sayers in the townland of Vicarstown, Dunquin, County Kerry, the youngest child of the family.
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