This book seems to be published as “The Clergyman’s Daughter” and “A Clergyman’s Daughter.” My reprint, published on demand just a few days ago in a place called Coppell, Texas, split the difference by calling it “The Clergyman’s Daughter” on the front cover and “A Clergyman’s Daughter” on the title page. I think Orwell would have liked that.
Not one of his best known novels but well worth your time, it is set in pre-World War 2, Depression era Great Britain, where the country’s Victorian social structure persists but is on the brink of change; and perhaps not for the better. The Anglican Church may no longer be up to playing its organizing, stabilizing role. Ordinary people are losing their faith in the old faith, but Orwell shows us that they may be gathering their strength for a new one.
St. Augustine said that the human heart is restless until it rests in the Lord. Orwell tells us that there is a hole in the human heart, or more accurately, a keyway, which must be filled with a faith of some kind to give life meaning. If it is not faith in God (which his protagonist, Dorothy Hare, loses), then at least a faith in ritual (which she regains). “A Clergyman’s Daughter” doesn’t go on to conclude that all-encompassing social/political ideologies will be the new churches of the latter half of the 20th century; Orwell’s later works will explore that new reality, and the consequences.
Dorothy Hare is a woman in her late 20s. She lives with her father, an Anglican priest. Her mother is deceased. She keeps the rectory running in its track of respectable poverty and works as an unpaid parish functionary: oversees the Sunday School, organizes the Mothers Club, makes costumes for the children’s Annual Play, that sort of thing. Her life is ordinary but full of obligations to others.
Invited to a dinner with a lecherous older man under that pretext that other guests would be present, she is confronted not so much with a physical threat to her chastity as an intellectual threat to her faith.
After retreating from that setting to her home and chores, Dorothy suffers a psychotic break which results in a profound amnesia. Orwell does not ascribe her loss of memory to an organic cause. Instead he posits that there comes a point when the human mind can only tolerate a finite level of fatigue, hunger, and cognitive dissonance before it makes a psychotic break with its present reality, cloaking itself in a fugue state.
Dorothy mentally surfaces on the streets of London, some days later, finding herself near penniless, homeless, lacking a name or a past. From there, her tale leads her to the occupations and locations of those people who live chronically on the margins of British society, and she slowly pieces together her identity and uncovers the details of her former home and family, to which she ultimately returns, albeit with a more complex inner life.
Just like his main character, Orwell spent time in a small, provincial village, picked hops in Kent, taught in a low-end private school, and went “on the bum.”
Dorothy’s insights into life, work, poverty, faith, and its loss are his insights.
