The most significant fact regarding Liam O'Flaherty's biography and writing is that he was born on Inishmore, one of the bleak, desolate Aran Islands--an isolated, primitive, often fogbound area constantly battered by storms and storm-tossed seas off the west coast of Ireland. O'Flaherty's characters and their environment recall those described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": "a savage place! / ... haunted / By woman wailing for her demon lover! / ... with ceaseless turmoil seething, / As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing."

Farming on the Aran Islands is difficult because much of the soil is rocky, not conducive to tilling and growth. In addition to farming many inhabitants make their livings by fishing, but the ever-present storms make this particularly precarious. The islands thus foster basic instincts and emotions, because nature there not only encourages such reactions but demands them. Certainly O'Flaherty's characters are marked by wild mood swings...