Although Moran is a well-respected member of his community and a devout Catholic, there is a cruel, violent, and controlling side to his character.

The title also references the traditional prayer, the Hail Mary, which contains the clause "blessed art thou amongst women".

This prayer is significant as it is part of the Rosary, which is prayed every day in the Moran household, and the event is a repeating motif throughout the novel.

They have decided to recreate Monaghan Day, an event Moran always seemed to enjoy, hoping that this will somehow reverse his failing health.

He thinks that his time in the IRA was the best of his life, and misses the security provided by the military's structure, rules, and clear demarcation of power.

Moran's personality becomes apparent in his dealings with his family, who all love and respect him despite his violent outbursts and his lack of apologies.

He feels that he is losing his position as the centre of attention as he ages and the children start to escape from Great Meadow.

The only way that the children can assert any autonomy is through exile, thus tacitly rebuking Moran's ethos of family solidarity.

Moran's friendship with McQuaid is also recounted using flashbacks, and there is an account of an attack carried out on the British Army by the Flying Column to which they belonged.

There is not a large amount of plot in the story, with most of the action taking place in flashbacks as the Morans remember the past.

All the small details of the Morans' lives gather together to give a powerful story of intergenerational relationships and the need to form connections to the past.

A theme of the novel is the difficulty of communication between a father and his children, which questions Ireland's conceit of itself as a healthy family-centred society.

Moran is a man capable of heroic action in a time of revolution, but he is incapable of meeting the demands of domestic and personal intimacy in his fraught and sometimes violent relationships with his wife and children.

He typifies the disappointment awaiting the revolutionary who aids the replacement of one power with another without reflecting on the process of domination itself.

Emigration is tolerated as a necessary evil, as it was in Ireland in the 1950s, but the economic failures that drove the mass exodus are never challenged.

As the main character, Moran, is never endearing, McGahern challenges the reader to empathise with him and to understand why the women in his life remain emotionally tied to him, even after they have successfully established independent lives away from Great Meadow.

Moran's retreat from his youthful exploits in the IRA into a vice-like grip on his household can be seen as a political metaphor, described by one critic as a "A diminished form of home rule."

Amongst Women refashions characters, themes and situations from The Barracks and The Dark, McGahern's first two novels.

His much-loved mother Susan died when he was a child, leaving McGahern and his siblings in the care of his father – a former IRA member – who was an authoritarian and self-absorbed Garda (policeman).

Once reviled – he left the country after his novel The Dark (1965) was banned by the Irish Censorship Board because it was deemed pornographic – he became one of Ireland's most eminent writers of fiction.

It starred Tony Doyle as Michael Moran, Ger Ryan as Rose, Susan Lynch as Maggie, Geraldine O'Rawe as Mona, Anne-Marie Duff as Sheila and Brían F O'Byrne as Luke.