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Original Title:	Amongst Women
ISBN:	0571195261 (ISBN13: 9780571195268)
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	Booker Prize Nominee (1990), The Irish Times Aer Lingus Literary Award (1991), The Hughes & Hughes Literary Award, Guinness Peat Aviation Award (1990)

Amongst Women

John McGahern

Paperback | Pages: 192 pages

Rating: 3.92 | 3191 Users | 258 Reviews

Declare Of Books Amongst Women

Title	:	Amongst Women
Author	:	John McGahern
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 192 pages
Published	:	May 18th 1998 by Faber (first published 1990)
Categories	:	Fiction. Cultural. Ireland. European Literature. Irish Literature

Rendition Conducive To Books Amongst Women

This tale of a curmudgeonly Irish father and his effect on his five children was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1990. While reading it, at first I thought of A Man Called Ove, another curmudgeon. But Ove was not a father and he softened up over time. Michael, this father, did not. As the story went along I thought more of Stoner; even though no one would call Stoner a curmudgeon, but, I thought: this is his life, this is the way he is; this is the way things are; it is what it is; he’s not going to change; what do you expect?



Michael is a farmer. He has small pension from having been in the Irish Army, but money is tight. He spends his days in backbreaking work dawn to dusk on his family farm, bringing in hay, tending the animals, mostly cattle. We learn quickly that he is the master of his roost. His wife and three daughters wait on him. He is served food first at a separate table and the rest of the family eats together afterwards.

He is stern and has ‘black moods;’ “…silence and deadness would fall on them” when he walks into a room. If a dish is dropped in the kitchen everyone freezes and looks to him for his reaction. His wife feels “inordinately grateful when he behaves normally” and “inordinately grateful for the slightest goodwill.” Yet his girls and youngest boy love him especially in those rare moments when he might dance around the room. Perhaps he is manic depressive?

The father says grace before and after meals. He leads the family in Catholic prayer every evening – a full rosary on their knees. His blackest moods come about most often when he thinks of his prodigal son, the oldest boy who ran off to London and never came back. (view spoiler)[ The son keeps in contact with his brother and sister but never comes back home. He sees his father once at one of his sister’s weddings and they speak politely for a minute. They exchange one polite letter. That’s it. He does not attend his father’s funeral. (hide spoiler)]



The girls and his wives accept his dominance; the boys rebel. All his children will eventually leave home to get work. The prodigal son owns a business renovating houses in London. The oldest daughter is a nurse in London; she visits home two or three times a year. The two younger girls get civil service jobs in Dublin and they come home every weekend until they both marry. The youngest boy, spoiled by his three older sisters and the second wife, rebels in a big way. (view spoiler)[When he is only fifteen, he takes up with an experienced 22-year old girl visiting back home for the summer from New York. The boy stops attending school and flees to London with help from his sister and brother living there. But unlike the oldest son, he makes up with his father and frequently returns home. (hide spoiler)] One daughter also rebels a bit as she gets older; she resents her father discouraging her from taking a scholarship to go to university.

The story is a wrap-around. It begins with the family gathering for what may be their last get-together with their father. It ends with that gathering, his death and funeral.

There’s good writing: “She was as far from ugliness as she was from beauty and she was young and strong and spirited.” There’s humor: When he lets his second wife set the wedding date, she notes that “…he was more like a man listening to a door close than one going toward his joy.” And “The man’s head was designed to keep his ears apart.”

Most of the story is told by an omniscient narrator with focus alternating on the characters. For example we get his courting of his second wife from her point of view (or, I should say her courting of him) and the young son’s escapades are told from his from his perspective.



The author has an easy, understated style of writing, quite a bit like his countryman, William Trevor. The story is slow at times and a few scenes get repetitive – such as too many weekend visits by the daughters -- but all in all a first-class read. The Guardian considered Amongst Women one of the all-time 100 best novels in a 2015 list. McGahern’s first novel, The Dark, was banned in Ireland for its content related to family sexual abuse.




The geographical setting is in northwest Ireland near Sligo, near the coast and close to the border with Northern Ireland. This is near where the author (1934-2006) grew up, in Ballinamore, County Leitrim.

Top photo, Sligo, from cloudfront.net/originals/erasmus-expe...
Landscape painting by Charles J. McAuley from woolleyandwallis.co.uk
The author from /i.guim.co.uk/
Main street in Ballinamore, the author's home town, from wikimedia commons

Rating Of Books Amongst Women

Ratings: 3.92 From 3191 Users | 258 Reviews

Evaluation Of Books Amongst Women

"there are few people who read this novel who grew up in any part of Ireland who haven't seen some of his traits in their own father."I didn't grow up

My Irish Literature tutor at Trinity College (a.k.a., Hot Scottish Tutor Peter Mackay, who hopefully is not reading this) said that this book would have made a better short story than it does a novel. While I enjoyed McGahern's simple, unflashy prose, I'm inclined to agree. The story covers the same ground again and again, and while the monotony of Moran's life may be part of the point, it doesn't make for the most enjoyable read.

This book was a gift from an Irish friend some years ago. I only picked it up two weeks ago and started reading it: I shouldn't have waited that long, this is a great book.It's not an 'easy' story though: a former Irish war hero, Moran, lives in the Irish countryside with his four teenage children (one boy and three girls, the oldest son Luke moved away to London after a personal conflict with his father) and Rose, his second wife. We follow the life of the family: how Moran lives alone with the

Many significant Irish novels published during the 80s and 90s (I think, in particular, of Colm Toibin's wonderful The Heather Blazing) seem to feature characters and plots that struggle to reconcile the revolutionary ideals of the early twentieth century with the soullessness and disenchantments of some aspects of the new state that finally came into being. McGahern's memorable patriarch and former IRA man, Moran, is emblematic of such characters. Although rarely likable, Moran is nevertheless

Powerful Irish novel on family and country. Couldn't put it down.

A short book, but claustrophobic in its persistent domestic dysfunction, its unrelentingly dissatisfied central character, its unsympathetic disdain for chapter breaks. Irish Catholic patriarchs are a breed apart, but a specific breed nonetheless -- my childhood best friend's father was the living manifestation of Moran, at sea in a household of mostly women, who turned to him for direction and a sense of purpose, needing him to feel necessary and connected while at the same time resenting it.

How great literature transcends time and place!