A Clergyman's Daughter

A Clergyman's Daughter is the second novel by George Orwell, published in 1935 by Gollancz. Orwell wrote it between mid-January and 3 October 1934, while living with his parents in Southwold, a small seaside town on the Suffolk coast, where he had returned to convalesce after leaving his teaching post. The book draws on his recent experiences: his spells living as a tramp, his work picking hops in Kent in 1931, and his years teaching at small private schools on the outskirts of London.

The protagonist is Dorothy Hare, an unmarried woman of about twenty-eight who keeps house for her widowed father, a clergyman, in the fictional town of Knype Hill. Her days are spent managing the household, fending off creditors and carrying out parish duties, practising a strict mortification of the flesh. Her life is turned upside down after an evening with Mr Warburton, a local man of dubious reputation, when she suffers amnesia and loses eight days of memory. From then on the novel follows her through a chain of situations in which she depends on others in turn: a group of vagrants, the workers in the hop fields, a cheap hostel for working women, the streets, a police cell, and finally a badly run girls' school.

Formally it is the most experimental of Orwell's novels. One chapter, the third, is written entirely as dramatic dialogue between Dorothy and a group of tramps in Trafalgar Square. Orwell was never satisfied with the book and left instructions that it should not be reprinted after his death, though he later agreed to cheap editions that might bring in money for his heirs. Its critical reception was mixed, and it is now often read as a portrait of working-class life in interwar England and as an early expression of Orwell's concern with economic dependence and social injustice.