Product Description

Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied housekeeper. Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play, by the hopelessness of preaching to the poor and by debts she cannot pay in 1930s Depression England. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket and cannot remember her name. Orwell leads us through a landscape of unemployment, poverty and hunger, where Dorothy's faith is challenged by a social reality that changes her life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #212698 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame. George Orwell died in London in January 1950. A few days before, Desmond MacCarthy had sent him a message of greeting in which he wrote: ‘You have made an indelible mark on English literature . . . you are among the few memorable writers of your generation.’

Customer Reviews

Not a classic, but still genuine Orwell
This is a fine book, but it suffers as it is judged against Orwell's amazing canon of classic novels that have stood the test of time. Where it remains valid today is in the sense of futileness. It is in a sense an existential examination of what life is all about. Why do we struggle? Why to we make an effort and why bother? The horrified reaction of the parents when they find their girls have been taught English from Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' is because of their realisation that one of the final plot-twists in the classic text requires understanding of what a Caesarean-section involves. They prefer ignorance to understanding. Orwell again identifies yet another issue that plagues modern society, in that we prefer to judge learning at school by league tables, rather than understanding.

Fascinating and yet not really very good
George Orwell was a great English writer whose reputation has suffered from the tendency in English culture to regard the novel (and the poem) as the supreme test of a writer's worth. Orwell was clearly at his most stimulated and inspired as a writer when he had something urgent to say, but having something urgent to say is not always the best attitude to have when you are trying to write a novel. It certainly wasn't the best attitude for Orwell to have when he wrote this one, considering that when he wrote it he was really beginning to find his vocation as a political writer and that he was also (at the time) impressed and intimidated by the example of Joyce's 'Ulysses', which he'd just read. 'Ulysses' has a political dimension, but it is the work of a very different kind of writer. The result is a fascinating and disjointed mish-mash of a novel, and Orwell knew it; even while he was writing it, he was writing to friends to say that he was making a mess of it.

In spite of this, any fan of Orwell will have a soft spot for 'A Clergyman's Daughter', if only because it's this writer's most conspicuous failure. Some of it, the depiction of the heroine's awful and cramped life as the daughter of a snobbish and mean-minded clergyman, plus the vivid accounts of hop-picking and teaching in a cheap and nasty school, are unforgettable. Against that, you have to cope with the fairly implausible story (why and how does Dorothy lose her memory?), the shallow characterisation and the fairly woeful 'experimental' chapter in which Dorothy attempts to spend a night among the homeless in Trafalgar Square, the whole thing rendered as a clunky pastiche of a chapter in 'Ulysses'.

Orwell tried to digest his own personal experiences into fictional form, and in this case he failed. But it's an honourable failure; the book may not hang together as a fully realised work of art, but not many novels of the period were able to back up their mood of societal disillusionment with such excruciating and convincing detail. If you have never read Orwell, don't start here; try the essays, '1984' and 'Animal Farm', the finest products of his moral and political imagination. If you have read them already, this is a fascinating sidetrack. Orwell was right to think the book not good, but I for one am glad that his wish that it not be reprinted after his death has been disregarded. Dodgy as it is, it's still very interesting.

The adventures of a Vicar's daughter
On the surface, 'A Clergyman's daughter' charts the adventures of Dorothy, only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Vicar of St. Athelstan's, Knype Hill, Suffolk. Yet, the book is typical Orwell: we are told that the Vicar is unable to afford a Curate, so he leaves the dirty work of the parish to her, after the death of his wife, such as distributing parish magazines and rubbing old ladies' legs with Elliman's embrocation. The Vicar lived in the past, in his "golden Oxford days, when such vulgar things as tradesmen's bills didn't exist". Consequently, Dorothy has a constant struggle with money, as a result of her father's "investments", the blight of most clergymen with an inheritance - he is the grandson of a baronet. Dorothy is used to describe the stereotypical characters she comes into contact with.

The story really picks up after her helping in the preparations for the Festival Day with Victor Stone, the schoolmaster with controversial ideas. She has taken home the unfinished jackboots for the children's pageant. Late at night, when heating the glue, something happens to her after inhaling the fumes and succumbing to tiredness. The scene transposes to the New King's Road, London, in stark contrast to the comfortable Rectory.

She has lost her memory and falls in with some people hoping to find employment hop-picking. After a long journey and many failures, they are successful at Cairns's Farm, Clintock. At this point, the narrative lapses into the semi-autobiographical mode inherent in so much of Orwell's fiction, much of it being coloured by experience. The graphic description of hop-picking, and the absence of characters in parts of it is evidence, and a prime example of his characteristic fusion of investigative work and experience of Down and Out in Paris and London (a link to this may be found in the Trafalgar Square scene, where Dorothy ends up with a group of down-and-outs) with the stereotypical portrayal of 'Mondeo Man's' precursor in Coming up for Air. Orwell shunned 'conventional' society in parts of his life in order to 'see how the other half lives'. He championed the ill-educated, untold masses, at a time when socialism, communism and radical politics were at a zenith. A lot of his work is a form of investigative journalism, and The Road to Wigan Pier is the best example of this.

Orwell spent part of his life teaching, and we are treated to vivid descriptions of the conditions prevailing in third- and fourth-rate fee-paying schools. There was more emphasis on profit than actual education. The "Ringwood House Academy, Brough Road, Southbridge," and its proprietress, Mrs. Creevy, represented to profusion of such establishments. For example, Mrs. Creevy lays particular emphasis on handwriting-lessons and skills that the parents will see as "practical", rather than educating them. They are forced to memorise horrid little "readers", containing potted accounts of England's history. Thus, the pupils are ill motivated and hate the teachers. When Dorothy arrives, she sets about buying new books with some of her meagre savings and although lacking in previous experience, sets about teaching them to think for themselves and giving them individual attention.

But the badly educated, prejudiced and interfering parents exacerbate the situation, and the worst point is reached when they do Macbeth. The children go home asking what a womb is, and after a scene, she is forced back to the old, practical method. The children rebel.

Eventually, she is rescued by a friend from Knype Hill, Mr. Warburton, with whom the village scandalmongers had assumed Dorothy to have eloped. Despite attempts to dissuade her from becoming a "derelict parson's daughter, like the ten thousand others", and give him her hand in marriage, she refused, and was soon back into the old routine. She found affairs in the village little-changed in her absence, and what is most ironic is that her Faith, which in the beginning was an integral part of her, and important to her, has now been lost. However much she tries to find it again, it will not return. Faith, assumed constant, has in this instance exchanged places with ever-changing time, and leads to questions about the meaning of life itself, in light of experience.