Against her own mother's warnings that Michael's personality will change when he's behind close doors, Rose marries him anyway. When the kids are in their teens, Michael marries Rose Brady. He starts isolating the family from the outside world and exerting greater control over the lives of each of its members. After McQuaid storms off and severs their long friendship, Michael sets out to prove just how much of an authority he really is. This is a watershed event in Michael's life. He and McQuaid get into an argument when Michael refuses to acknowledge McQuaid as an authority on at least equal par with his own authority, if not more so. Both on the farm and within the family, power structures are forever changing, susceptible to the whims of nature and the human spirit.ĭuring a previous Monaghan Day when the family is much younger, Michael displays his natural domineering personality. Now thrust into a caretaker mode in a wild rural setting, he longs for the structure military life provided, where he knew the rules and knew who was in power. He remembers his years in the IRA as the most fulfilling and exciting of his life. After the wars, he lives on a farm called Great Meadow, where he raises two sons and three daughters as a widowed father.
In the early 1920s, Michael Moran is an outspoken Republican advocating for a free and independent Ireland. Though flashbacks, each female member of the Moran family reflects on Michael's life and the journey that has brought him to this crossroads. On Monaghan Day, Michael's old friend McQuaid would visit, and the two would trade stories about their time together in the war. In an attempt to boost Michael's flagging spirit and mounting health woes, the daughters reconstruct a family event from their youth, called Monaghan Day. Though they have lives of their own away from the family farm, the daughters feel like their true place is with their father. His daughters care for him on the rural County Leitrim farmstead where they grew up.
The book begins with Michael as an old man in failing health. They exist in an uncomfortable gray area between adoring Michael and being terrified of him as he attempts to make the transition from guerilla fighter to head of a family. Set in the years following Ireland's War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, it is a family story centering on Michael Moran, a mercurial, disillusioned veteran of the Irish Republican Army, who terrorizes his wife and children. Amongst Women is a novel by preeminent Irish author John McGahern, first published by Faber and Faber in 1990.
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