When Patricia O’Connor’s novel, The Mill in the North, was first published in 1938, by Dublin’s prestigious Talbot Press, the Irish Times heralded it as ‘a very human drama … presenting a realistic picture of life in a northern mill village’. For today’s reader, the novel skilfully presents to us an Irish community in rural County Down painfully caught between tradition and modernity, where sectarian prejudice and violence can unexpectedly disrupt daily life. Focusing on Nancy Montgomery, a young woman fired from the local mill for insolence, the novel presents the social friction caused by this assertive, principled woman seeking to protect those she loves.
