SOURCE: Duguid, Lindsay. “The Passing of the Old Ways.” Times Literary Supplement (18 May 1990): 535.

In the following review, Duguid offers a positive assessment of Amongst Women.

The Ireland of the 1950s is prime literary territory. From that point in the country's history it seems easy both to look back to the comparatively recent events of the Troubles and the Civil War and to be aware of the steady encroachment of modern life—cars, bungalows, flights to London. The past and the future seem to be held in balance. William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston and Molly Keane have all portrayed the disintegration of the old society in the newly independent country, and we are accustomed to adopting a long perspective on the crumbling houses and the overgrown fields, a bleak landscape infused with memory and melancholy.

John McGahern could wring melancholy from a stone. His novels and short stories focus on...