SOURCE: A review of The Village, in The Spectator, Vol. 162, No. 5783, April 28, 1939, p. 730.

O'Brien was an Irish novelist and playwright. In the following excerpt, she extols the universality of the theme of The Village.

The Village is a slow and informative narrative of peasant life in a remote community of the Punjab in the years just before the War of 1914–1918. Accumulatively and without sensationalism, it gives a vivid picture of a life that is poor and terrible, but in many aspects extremely dignified, and which is made complicated and alarming by ritualistic fears, regulations and traditions which, though novel, can of course be paralleled by similar evolutions and excesses in any old and self-conscious race. The interesting thing, indeed, about this story is that, closely localised as it is, its theme is universal, not to say commonplace. For it tells of the growth of a sensitive boy in...