A Clergyman's Daughter

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. She helps him stave off his creditors and makes costumes for fund-raising events. After being invited to dinner by Mr Warburton, a local atheist and libertine, Dorothy is glimpsed in his arms by the village gossip, Mrs Semprill. As a result, she suffers a breakdown and, struck by amnesia, embarks on a journey that sees 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. In its depiction of a protagonist who rebels against and is ultimately vanquished by the society that oppresses her, it is a clear prefiguration of later novels such as Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four.