This chapter looks at the way McGahern represents the memory of the Irish revolution in Amongst Women, That They May Face the Rising Sun, and in his autobiographical writings. The disillusioned and often bitter reflections of his protagonists partly reflect his own family’s experience, but also echo a strong reaction among writers and ex-activists in the 1920s and 1930s, whose responses and regrets are traced through the writings of people such as P.S. O’Hegarty, Desmond Ryan, Ernie O’Malley and Bulmer Hobson, as well as private letters and reflections. It is suggested that McGahern is in a sense channelling a powerful theme in the history of independent Ireland, that of living with the memory of violence by means of evasion and suppression, and that this lends his fiction a historical dimension which has not been fully appreciated.
Introduction: a global history of the Irish Revolution
