I remember him telling me that, in one early draft, his novel had been several times its final length. The change of title was McGahern’s idea and it reflected the constant process of revision through which he put all his work. When it was first delivered to McGahern’s London publishers, Faber & Faber, Amongst Women was called “Monaghan Day”, after the Moran family’s market day routine when the old man’s former comrades would visit him at home in “Great Meadow” and relive forgotten battles from the civil war.
It is also a hauntingly beautiful evocation of a world and a landscape that McGahern knew well, the liminal society of County Leitrim, caught between Eire and “the six counties” of the north.
As Moran says: “I’m afraid we might all die in Ireland if we don’t get out.” So Moran’s own ultimate death becomes a strange moment of release for his family, especially his daughters, who are now free to become themselves.Īt barely 190 pages, McGahern’s study of Irish family life is a miracle of unaffected brevity and unconsciously an elegy for a lost world. As his wife says: “He’s a different sort of person altogether behind the walls of his own house.” This Ireland is a prison. In this lost world of terrorists and priests, the menfolk discover their true selves in bitter sectarian violence, but cannot sustain the intimacies of family life. Amongst Women explores the patriarchal faultlines of an Irish society that, since the novel was published, has almost vanished. Moran, a fighter in the civil war of the 1920s, and a fierce former guerrilla commander, is presented as a typically obdurate kind of Irish father. As so often in Irish life, it is the drumbeat of the past that continues to torment his final days. His wife, Rose, and their three daughters who love and fear their father, now care for him as his health fails and the shadows draw on. This will be the story of an IRA veteran facing up to approaching death at home in the bosom of his family. Its characteristically limpid opening sentence – “As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters” – encapsulates the main theme.
Amongst Women, a title derived from the words of the Hail Mary in the Roman Catholic rosary, is McGahern’s masterpiece, uniting all the dominant themes of his work in a single, deeply affecting family drama.
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