A Clergyman's Daughter

by George Orwell

Book Overview

Dorothy, the heroine of this novel, performs good works, cultivates good thoughts, and pricks her arm with a pin when a bad thought arises. She then has a series of unexpected and degrading adventures after becoming a victim of amnesia. Though she regains her life as a clergyman's daughter, she has lost her faith.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156180650
• ISBN13: 9780156180658
• Release Date: January 1950
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Story by Dickens, script by Joyce, philosophy by Camus

Some say, this is the weekest of Orwell's 6 novels. I am not so sure. But even if it is, it is still so much more interesting than most other writers' 'good' novels. If it is a bad novel, it is still a very good book. Sure, the text is uneven. The chapters talk a different language. So? Chapter 1 is a 'plain' tale of a young woman in Suffolk, a spinsterish, neurotic, sex-phobic, obedient, pious, nice person, called Dorothy. She has a bad hypertrophy of sense of duty. She lets herself be exploited as an unpaid church helper. Her father, the clergyman, is maybe the biggest idiot in his profession that you can find in literature. This life happens in Knype Hill in Suffolk, the small town that you never want to get to know. Chapter 2 is the catastrophe: Dorothy had a blackout, and at awakening, she is not in any kind of Ozish wonderland, but has lost 8 days of her life plus her memory plus her self. Who is she? She somehow joins a small band of bums who go hop-picking in Kent. This chapter is maybe the worst; Orwell grafts his own diary texts about hop picking on Dorothy's life. It is not working. A very odd text. She finds out who she is and realizes that her disappearance was a major scandal at home: her small home town thinks she eloped with an older man of disreputable morals. She appeals to her father for help and gets no answer. Chapter 3 is brillant: Dorothy has ended up with the homeless crowd at Trafalgar Square. A Joycean text of multiple voices, which rarely attends to Dorothy, but never lets us forget where she is. Arrest is a step to salvation. Chapter 4 and then 5 go back to straighforward narration. Father, through a relative, has somehow managed to get her saved from the street. She gets a job as a teacher, and finds herself in servitude to the worst school owner that you can find. The job is hell. She gets fired, but then there is another level of rescue: she may come home, she has been rehabilitated. Chapter 5 shows her in the dreariness of her sad prospects: unpaid church helper, a father who will leave her poor when he dies in maybe 10 years, no other prospects than oldmaidhood and poor jobs. And worst: she has lost faith, but she can not resign herself to the view that life is meaningless. Like a proper Sisyphus she keeps pushing the rock upwards on the hillside. Yes, this is not smooth. The neurological aspects of the story (amnesia, regaining self-identification) seem dubious. (Maybe Oliver Sacks could have a look?). The text also has some of Orwell's less agreeable characteristics: he was something of a racist as a young man. This seems to have been worked out of his sytem later. Here he still writes about the gypsies, that they have 'oafish, oriental faces', that they exude 'dense stupidity, untameable cunning'. Come on, George/Eric! There is a 'Jew' who lusts after Dorothy in a way that could have been taken straight from the 'Stuermer'. Sure, Jews could have been lusting after her, but so might all the others. Where was th

A thought-provoking book

'A Clergyman's Daughter' by George Orwell (1935)A clever portrait, through five chapters (with sub-chapters), of the young adult life of Dorothy Hare and those she comes into contact with. As the book opens, Dorothy is the religiously-obsessed, oppressed and overworked 27 year-old spinster daughter of the Rector of St Athelstans in Knype Hill, Suffolk. The story of her life over the next eight months unfolds and develops from there... This book is excellently written and is an enjoyable read from start to finish: writing of high quality touching on many of the usual themes that concern George Orwell, such as rural life, religion, education, poverty, humanity, London life, loneliness, struggling within life, human nature, greed, selfishness, etc: themes which tend to run through most of Orwell's various writings in one form or another. Orwell cleverly changes the setting and nature of the book entirely, between each of the five long chapters, making the book in fact five separate and different phases within eight months of Dorothy's life within a book, thereby keeping the reader interested throughout by the use of clever shifts in the setting of the story through to the end, to avoid any risk of boring the reader. We are left, at the end of the book, to decide what we think about Dorothy, having seen how she has negotiated what has happened to her in the interim and the choices she makes about her future life having regard to those events. 4/5

One of Orwell's Best

Knowing what was finally going to come of Dorothy kept me until 2:30 AM this morning...and I wasn't disappointed.Orwell cheats right out of the chute: In realizing that he may not know enough about women to write about our protagonist, he immediatedly removes her sexuality by telling us she is disgusted by the thought of "that." Nuff said. Our hero(ine) is now pretty much asexual. What a story though. Plumbing the depths of faith and predestiny, Orwell weaves a fairly heavy tale of the motherless daugther of a grim and dispassionate minister obsessed only with his investments and petty theological particulars. The minister's daughter loyally fills in the gaps, acting as the heart and soul of a failling church, praying her way against impossible odds while visiting the sick, recruiting new church goers, seeing to the buildings and her father's meals...and eventually completely wigging out.Now the fun begins.This is a warm and rewarding book, full of human insight and only a little bit of Orwell's patented socialist soap-boxing.

The best book about religion and it's many aspects I've read

A definite must for anyone liking Orwell, or intellectual thoughts on the meaning of life and where relgion fit's into the grand scheme of things.

Up there with his best

I think this is a great novel, as atmospheric and moving as my other favorite novel by him, 1984.To me, the most incredible and resonant parts of the book are those about homelessness - the nightly routines - trying to sleep in trafalgar square, being allowed to sit in the cafe from 6 AM etc. It is all so intimately described that you feel as if you are there. In this way it recalls 'down and out in paris and london'.Definitely a winner