by George Orwell
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Product Description
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.
Amazon.com Review
At the distance of a half-century, this satiric social fiction is both a treasure and a disappointment. Orwell's wit is priceless--and ruthless--as he describes rural Church of England parish life; the transitory culture of the hops harvest; a brothel's soiled linen; not to mention when his heroine hobnobs with the Trafalgar Square homeless of a bitter winter's night or bullies bored students in a fourth-rate private school: "Last term the girls had behaved badly, because she had started by treating them as human beings, and later on, when the lessons that interested them were discontinued, they had rebelled like human beings. But if you are obliged to teach children rubbish, you must not treat them as human beings.... Before all else, you must teach them it is more painful to rebel than to obey." Orwell's compassion for Dorothy Hare, ensnared by faith, birth, and gender to toil thanklessly as her minister father's unpaid curate, is admirable, and his evocation, early in the novel, of a woman's consciousness totally subsumed by the mostly trivial demands of others stands shoulder to shoulder with the best feminist fiction. The dialogues between Dorothy and her dissolute middle-aged suitor, Mr. Warburton, concerning human nature, faith, and morality, are smart and fun to read. The problem (and here Orwell commits the sort of sin he denounces in Dickens) is that the novel's plot--Dorothy's picaresque amnesiac travels through the seamy side of English life--feels manufactured for the author's satiric purposes. Orwell never relinquishes his cleverness, or his maleness, to become his heroine, with the result that the reader never surrenders wholly to the fiction. Thus A Clergyman's Daughter, while a pleasure to pick up, is not quite a book one can't put down. --Joyce Thompson
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Average Customer Review:
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
 Story by Dickens, script by Joyce, philosophy by Camus, 2008-05-08
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 the point here?
The novel is a highly interesting 'Bildungsroman', in a reverse sort of way. Reading my own review now I conclude that I would consider it one of Orwell's best productions.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
A Dickensian Affair, 2008-04-20
Dorothy Hare is the clergyman's daughter. A chief torment of her life is the butcher's bill. The rector is ill-humored. He is an anachronism. Their church, St. Athelstan's, is located in Suffolk. The rector exists in a chronic state of exasperation. He is the grandson of a baronet, (the youngest son of a youngest son). He is on a life-long search for a good investment and, consequently, feels it is perfectly proper to neglect paying the butcher.
The Dean's wife is detestable. Dorothy fears that in the course of a visit she will discover that Dorothy and her father are in debt. The condition of the church belfry is iffy. The church organ fund needs replenishing. Either science and free thought or the dullness of the services have caused the congregation of St. Athelstan's to dwindle.
Whereas the rector doesn't really fit into the community, Dorothy does. She visits the down-hearted, the neglected. She makes many costumes for the children's plays.
As happened to Agatha Christie in real life, Dorothy absents herself from her home in mysterious fashion. Dorothy and a companion are employed as hop pickers. In PIPPIN'S WEEKLY Dorothy reads the story of herself. It is troubling. Her memory returns and she seeks to go back to Knype Hall. She writes to her father. No answer is received and she endures life in the vicinity of London for ten days, jobless.
The rector does try to contact Dorothy. Unfortunately he does not believe she really lost her memory. The manservant of Sir Thomas Hare, his cousin, finds Dorothy. (George Orwell has put his character Dorothy Hare into the position of being down and out in London; thus anticipating his own autobiographical adventures).
Sir Thomas arranges for Dorothy to teach school at Ringwood House Academy. It is a mean school. (The George Orwell, Eric Blair, school-critic is apparent here in the above-cited episode of the novel.) The further adventures of Dorothy are related as she makes her way back to the village where the story begins.
In this novel the author feelingly portrays with verve his personal brand of stoicism through his description of Dorothy Hare and her life. It is an uneven but exciting story. The experiment of conveying the subject's reaction to environmental stresses is successful in part. In establishing the character and circumstances of the heroine Orwell moves as confidently and lightly as a latter-day Jane Austen.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 worthy dream, 2006-04-05
i read this more as an essay and commentary regarding prewar england. themes of church intollerance, school rigidity, classism, bigotry, etc. abound. one can read this literally, leaving the task confused and befuddled. one should read this metaphorically, perhaps as a dream sequence, to fairly appreciate what orwell sought to accomplish. i enjoyed elements of this for the sheer brilliance of observation. life at the hops camp was particularlly sharp. if one appreciates gritty labor struggles and observations of the religiously constrained, this will be a pile of words worth reading.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
A thought-provoking book, 2004-05-17
'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
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
 Simply average, 2003-06-23
A clergyman's daughter, a plain girl, Mysterisously disappears with the town hoodlum and then loses her memory. This is the story of her life after this occurrs. It is not all I had come to expect from Orwell but it is an enjoyable book that keeps you reading for more. Read only if you are a die hard Orwell fan and then only if you are willing to accept a so-so work. Otherwise you can read it but don't expect to be blown away.
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