On a farm in Finland a maidservant [the central character of The Maid Silja] lies dying of consumption on a June morning…. [Sillanpaa] tries to trace back the delicate thread of her life to her father's father and find the obscure and hardly realized accidents or incidents that have led to this dismal end of a great family once prosperous. This invoking of the scientific method of examination is an excuse for a lucid and dispassionate style and not the preliminary to a case history….

The theme … is familiar—a young girl goes unprotected in a man's world, an object of assault and desire. But over this life lies a strange beauty. Like her father, the maid Silja lives serenely within a core of invulnerability, gazing with a sense of detachment at the world through which she moves. The growth of her personality seems as inevitable in its...