A Clergyman's Daughter

Paperback

Twenty-eight-year-old Dorothy Hare leads a life of drudgery and self-abnegation in the house of her father, the rector of Knype Hill, helping him stave off his creditors and making costumes for fund-raising events. When, after being invited to dinner by Mr Warburton, a local atheist and libertine, she is glimpsed in his arms by the village gossip, Mrs Semprill, Dorothy suffers a breakdown and, struck by amnesia, embarks on journey that will see her join a group of vagrants, pick hops in the fields of Kent, stay in a hotel for “working girls” and sleep rough on the streets of London. Perhaps the most experimental among his writings, A Clergyman’s Daughter, first published in 1935, is Orwell’s second work of fiction – and one that, in its depiction of a protagonist who rebels against and is ultimately vanquished by the society that oppresses her, is a clear prefiguration of later novels such as Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Twenty-eight-year-old Dorothy Hare leads a life of drudgery and self-abnegation in the house of her father, the rector of Knype Hill, helping him stave off his creditors and making costumes for fund-raising events. When, after being invited to dinner by Mr Warburton, a local atheist and libertine, she is glimpsed in his arms by the village gossip, Mrs Semprill, Dorothy suffers a breakdown and, struck by amnesia, embarks on journey that will see her join a group of vagrants, pick hops in the fields of Kent, stay in a hotel for “working girls” and sleep rough on the streets of London. Perhaps the most experimental among his writings, A Clergyman’s Daughter, first published in 1935, is Orwell’s second work of fiction – and one that, in its depiction of a protagonist who rebels against and is ultimately vanquished by the society that oppresses her, is a clear prefiguration of later novels such as Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A new edition of Orwell's starkly realistic second novel, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D. J. Taylor First published in 1935, when Orwell was struggling to establish himself as a writer, A Clergyman's Daughter tells the story of twenty-something Dorothy Hare, whose mundane life in a Suffolk rectory is thrown out of kilter by an amnesiac episode that sets her adrift in a new and frighteningly insecure world. This new edition includes an introduction, extensive anecdotes and an appendix containing original responses to the novel as well as letters and documents from the period in which it was written.

A new edition of Orwell's starkly realistic second novel, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D. J. Taylor First published in 1935, when Orwell was struggling to establish himself as a writer, A Clergyman's Daughter tells the story of twenty-something Dorothy Hare, whose mundane life in a Suffolk rectory is thrown out of kilter by an amnesiac episode that sets her adrift in a new and frighteningly insecure world. This new edition includes an introduction, extensive anecdotes and an appendix containing original responses to the novel as well as letters and documents from the period in which it was written.