Waveland Press - Nan - The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman by Sharon Bohn Gmelch

Margaret Mead Award finalist! 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. Over time, they came to 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.

Bonus video:

The author reflects on early fieldwork among the Irish Travellers in an interview for National University of Ireland, Galway, Irish Traveller Ethnicity Celebration, 2021

“It really is a classic and fills an important niche—artful crafting of narrative with a European narrator on issues that are still contemporary: treatment of women, poverty, and modernization. I consider it to be one of the best written oral biographies available.” —Bill Schneider, University of Alaska

“This is a gripping book, full of wonder and pity, telling as much about Ireland as about the character it so vividly portrays.” —Edna O’Brien

“Nan is a fascinating, carefully researched, and very well written book. It has the rarest of qualities in an academic work: a description of a human lifeway that is both factually sound and emotionally powerful. Few books delve so deeply into what is truly and universally human while also exploring a culture different from our own.” —Richard K. Nelson

“An extraordinary and moving book, and a finely wrought one. Nan herself becomes a moving figure, a woman of unselfconscious dignity and capacity to endure. Best of all, Gmelch brings to her task not only the resources of anthropology, but the skill of a sensitive writer and a warmth which allows her to see Nan as a person, not a subject.” —Thomas Flanagan

Foreword (Benedict Kiely)
Preface
Preface 1991
1. Nan
2. The Sweep’s Daughter
3. The Kitchen Maid
4. The Unwilling Wife
5. Travelling in the North
6. Never the Same After
7. Galway
8. Dublin
9. Birmingham
10. Holylands
11. The Old One
Epilogue