 I decided not just for reasons of space to deal separately with the third, A Clergyman's Daughter. It is a strange book, and not an entirely satisfactory one in content or in form. Anyone studying the professional trajectory of the man I regard as the most accomplished English writer of the last century must read it: for it is not least by experiencing Orwell's faults that one better appreciates his development as a novelist and a prose stylist. Also, Orwell on a bad day is, in his use of language and powers of observation, better than most writers on a good one . He wrote A Clergyman's Daughter , his second novel, in 1934, and it was published the following year. He was so unhappy with it that he ordered it never to be reprinted; though he noted years later, 'after I am dead I do not object to cheap editions of any book which may bring in a few pounds for my heirs'. It is included in Peter Davison's magisterial complete edition of Orwell's writings in 20 volumes, and still in print in paperback. The author's main objection to his book appeared to be the experiment in form in the third of its five chapters, which owes much to the brothel scene in James Joyce's Ulysses, published 13 years earlier. Even in their superior abilities with the English language Orwell had little in common with Joyce, whose style was intensely allusive and, when self-consciously arty, lightened by abundant humour and a sharp ear for dialogue. Orwell was short on the former throughout his career and was still developing the latter. As with all Orwell's pre-war novels, A Clergyman's Daughter contains large elements of autobiography. Indeed although Dorothy Hare, the heroine, is a different sex from the author, aspects of her life are redolent of his. The novel is set in the genteel Eastern Counties town of Knype Hill, where Dorothy's odious widowed father is rector. She l){kind=link}
His dystopia was foretold in an early, troubling Orwell novel, The Clergyman’s Daughter – set in an all-too-familiar part of the south coast
When I wrote recently about two of the three pre-war George Orwell novels set in England (another, Burmese Days, was not) I decided not just for reasons of space to deal separately with the third, A Clergyman’s Daughter. It is a strange book, and not an entirely satisfactory one in content or in form. Anyone studying the professional trajectory of the man I regard as the most accomplished English writer of the last century must read it: for it is not least by experiencing Orwell’s faults that one better appreciates his development as a novelist and a prose stylist. Also, Orwell on a bad day is, in his use of language and powers of observation, better than most writers on a good one.He wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter, his second novel, in 1934, and it was published the following year. He was so unhappy with it that he ordered it never to be reprinted; though he noted years later, “after I am dead I do not object to cheap editions of any book which may bring in a few pounds for my heirs”. It is included in Peter Davison’s magisterial complete edition of Orwell’s writings in 20 volumes, and still in print in paperback.
The author’s main objection to his book appeared to be the experiment in form in the third of its five chapters, which owes much to the brothel scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses, published 13 years earlier. Even in their superior abilities with the English language Orwell had little in common with Joyce, whose style was intensely allusive and, when self-consciously arty, lightened by abundant humour and a sharp ear for dialogue. Orwell was short on the former throughout his career and was still developing the latter.As with all Orwell’s pre-war novels, A Clergyman’s Daughter contains large elements of autobiography. Indeed although Dorothy Hare, the heroine, is a different sex from the author, aspects of her life are redolent of his. The novel is set in the genteel Eastern Counties town of Knype Hill, where Dorothy’s odious widowed father is rector. She lives in a form of self-imposed slavery with him, apparently through a failure of will and determination.
Knype Hill is a fictionalised Southwold, in Suffolk, where Orwell’s parents had settled; and where from time to time he lived throughout the early 1930s. Dorothy escapes Knype Hill by accident; contracting amnesia, and with over a week of her life unaccounted for, ending up in the New Kent Road and teaming up with a group of vagrants. Orwell does not handle this transition especially credibly, and some may consider it an even more inelegant passage than the Joycean interlude, which is set among the vagrants, written like a comedy scene and is, overall, weak.
Two other autobiographical episodes from Orwell’s life embody themes he wanted to exploit in this fiction. First, the vagrants make their way down to Kent to do some hop-picking, an activity Orwell had also undertaken in one of his self-flagellatory attempts to grasp the real lives of the very poorest people. Dorothy recovers her memory but reads a story about herself in a newspaper, which claims (wrongly) that she was fleeing Knype Hill after being seduced by the local rake. She decides she cannot go home, not least after writing to her father who, in a calculatedly unchristian fashion, does not reply to her. He does ask his cousin, a baronet, to help; and his servant tracks Dorothy down having found her a job in a girl’s school.This leads to the next line of attack, which is that in Orwell’s view private education existed to make profits for proprietors and not to expand the minds of the pupils; something of an exaggerated view of his own experience at prep school that he later caricatured in his autobiographical essay Such, Such Were the Joys. Each reader must judge how effective his satire is: he lays it on thickly and without the deftness of his contemporary Evelyn Waugh. The other weakness is that the appearance of the helpful cousin is a little like too many plot devices in Dickens, where a saviour turns up and it usually provides a happy ending. In fact, it takes a second saviour to pluck Dorothy out of the near-slavery of her private school, and back to the near-slavery of Knype Hill. This troubling book has another interesting feature that was pointed out by DJ Taylor, Orwell’s biographer: that, like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dorothy ends up having to make an accommodation with her tormentors. To understand that work of genius better, we need to read A Clergyman’s Daughter.