Sir, - I have three brief final points to make about Peig Sayers and how we read her work. Rev Pat Moore (April 21st) cites a passage about Peig's response to the match made for her in "the account of her life", in which he approvingly emphasises Peig's willing obedience to her fate in being married off to someone she had never seen before the match was made. I feel I must enlighten Fr Moore as to the existence of another and totally different account of the matter, also given by Peig. There are, of course, three volumes of her life-story, not one. In the third, Beatha Pheig Sayers, Peig tells at length in Chapters 1618 how she had several times seen her future husband Peatsai "Flint" O Gaoithin on his visits to the mainland. She mentions being told of his interest in her by another island woman, and stresses how they had felt a strong mutual attraction. Finally she describes with much circumstantial detail how their match was made, according to contemporary custom, in a Dingle pub, by their relatives and friends and in their own presence. I for one would not feel secure in privileging one of these accounts over the other. Perhaps Fr Moore does so feel, or perhaps he was simply unaware of the existence of the second. If so, I would point out that, to borrow a phrase of his own, it is "a cardinal principle in literary criticism", as indeed in all other forms of intellectual inquiry, to be aware of all the relevant data.My second point is in the form of a question, and arises out of the first. Fr Moore writes in the tone of one blithely confident of his own freedom from "ideological reading". But is it not precisely an "ideological reading", and one which in effect endorses the subjection of women in past times to the dispensations made by patriarchal communities on their behalf, which leads him so to cherish the romantic first account of Peig's made match to a total stranger? Finally, as for what Fr Moore calls "inappropriate" readings, I can only reiterate that tact and sympathetic imagination are required in approaching the writing of other times and places. But to withhold one's own responses to a work, in all their difference from it, is to enshrine it in a glass case like a dead specimen (a process, alas, carried out over the generations by the deployment of an edited version of Peig to adolescents as an ideal of Irish womanhood). Thus I claim my right and that of others to make a feminist reading of all and any work, as distinct from labeling it as itself "feminist", which in the case of Peig's work I have never done. This distinction seems to have been lost upon Fr Moore. - Yours, etc.,Patricia Coughlan,Department of English,University College Cork.