Though McGahern’s father was a police officer and his mother a schoolteacher, they had a small farm where the writer spent his childhood years, and it was this home territory of rural Roscommon and Leitrim that was central to his fiction. Recurrently in the novels and stories, the former Republican father, disillusioned with independent Ireland, rules over the farm as his own independent republic, but alienates the son whom he needs as heir. Amongst Women shows up the illusion of the patriarchal ideal of the family working together on the farm and its crippling gender politics. Yet, dissatisfaction with the city drives key characters back to the alternative life of the farm, as in ‘The Country Funeral’. In That They May Face the Rising Sun, McGahern creates his fullest version of the farming community, at once tenderly pastoral and caustically observed in its social reality.