A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell (1935) A woman’s novel written by a man?

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I found this book on the shelf at home when I was 15 and it kicked off my lifelong love of Orwell. First published in 1935 and republished by Penguin in the 1960s and 70s (it was the 1970s Penguin I first read), it has been republished more recently since Orwell’s work went out of copyright in 2020.

I absolutely relished it the first time I read it, as an absorbing, intriguing story crammed with authoritative and vivid descriptions of hop-picking, begging, sleeping rough and the dodgier kind of private ‘academy’ for girls (mostly based, I later discovered, on Orwell’s own experiences.) At the start of the novel, Dorothy Hare, the 28-year old unmarried daughter of an utterly selfish widower, has all the cares of the parish on her shoulders. She organizes the Girl Guides and the Mothers’ Union, and visits sick and aged parishioners, receives Communion daily, mortifies her flesh (I thought only Catholics did that) and keeps her father’s creditors – there are many – at bay. Her tightly-knit little community in Suffolk has a few malicious gossips and a lot of people who make demands of Dorothy, but some kindred souls,too. One of the latter is the opinionated teacher Victor Stone, another is the licentious author and bon viveur Mr Warburton. She enjoys his company and is not shocked at his open agnosticism, although she keeps having to repel his advances. Then, some traumatic event happens (we are never told exactly what), which causes her to lose her memory, and she finds herself sleeping rough in London. She makes friends with some Londoners including a young man called Nobby, and goes hop-picking with them to Kent, her memory returning only gradually. She calls herself Ellen. The hop-picking is described vividly; the dreadful accommodation and the backbreaking work is counterbalanced by the casual but sensitive generosity of the hop-pickers, mostly London working-class people who see this as their ‘holidays’. Nobby gets arrested, the hop-picking is over, she returns to London and ends up sleeping rough again – and there is a sequence that is in the form of a play, which I found fascinating at 15. Her memory comes back gradually and she finds she has been the subject of scandal, with news items like ‘Rector’s Daughter Flees to Paris’, and after many adventures she manages, with the help of money her father sends her, to get a job teaching (under the name Ellen Milborough) in a horrible private school run by a very nasty woman, Mrs Creevy, who fires her for no reason after working her like a dog for a school year. Eventually, through the intervention of Mr Warburton and the shaming of the village’s chief scandalmonger, Dorothy can return to her life as a clergyman’s daughter. At 15 I thought the ending was a terrible let-down, especially as she’d lost her faith completely, and no longer believed in God. I must have read this book more than once as a teenager, because parts of it stuck in my mind almost word for word.

Reading it again in my 60s, I appreciate it for all the reasons I did when I first encountered it, and more besides. I still find all the scenarios, from Dorothy’s pre-memory-loss daily round, to the hop-picking, to the private school, utterly absorbing, and I still enjoy Orwell’s explanations and comments, although one could argue that they are completely out of place in a work of fiction. At 15 I found the bald and stout Mr Warburton physically repellent and understood why Dorothy rejected him, not once, not twice but over and over. Then, however, I thought he was witty and original, and I found his views on religion thrilling, (although shocking), and I thought Orwell was giving him all the best lines. If only he was more handsome, if only he courted Dorothy a bit more gently and didn’t call his own ‘illegitimate’ children ‘the bastards’. And if only Dorothy would conquer her fear of what she thinks of as ‘all that’ (sex) which has already caused her to reject a marriage proposal from a dear friend!

Re-reading it, I still find Mr Warburton repellent, not so much for his physical attributes as for his constant ‘mansplaining’ of Dorothy’s life to her. Who is he to judge her clergyman’s-daughter life as worthless and meaningless, to paint such a grim picture of her future? Does he really think she’d be happier as his wife/live-in mistress, rearing his children, tolerating his infidelities and (worst of all) having to listen to him, day in day out? And furthermore I realise now, as I didn’t when I was young, that Orwell means us to see Warburton as a tedious, self-important bore, and that Warburton is not Orwell. Because, at the end of the book, when Dorothy is back in the rectory doing what she’s always done, boiling glue to make armour for a costume for the Girl Guides’ historical pageant,Orwell applauds her. With or without faith, she is doing ‘customary, useful and acceptable’ work. I completely missed this first time around.

Orwell pointed out elsewhere that most people are, in the ordinary course of events, heroic:

Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing while their decks are awash.

Dorothy’s heroism is very ordinary. Her adventures have not led her,( like that other Dorothy in a very different work of fiction made into a memorable film a few years later) to believe that there is ‘no place like home’. She knows how monotonous her parish life can be, she knows how lamentably selfish her father is, she knows the poverty of many of her parishioners won’t be solved by her interventions. But her experiences out in the world have led her to appreciate the interior, mental freedom her life gives her.

This book’s gentle insistence on the intrinsic value of an unmarried woman’s life places it firmly in the mainstream of the novels written by British and Irish female novelsists of Orwell’s day, the likes of Winifred Holtby, Barbara Pym, Lettice Cooper, Dorothy Whipple, Phyllis Bentley, F.M.Mayor, Ethel Mannin, M.L.Stewart, Elizabeth Brennan, Temple Lane, Annie M.P.Smithson and many, many more. Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up For Air (1939)showcase confused, unhappy men unsure of their role in life, but A Clergyman’s Daughter is an understated and restrained celebration of female strength and autonomy.

George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter (London: Gollancz 1935: Penguin 1964; Arcturus 2021)

———————-‘The Art of Donald McGill’ in George Orwell, Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg 1975).

ABOUT CLEAR CLASSICS BLOG: This is where I write about books and authors from the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and occasionally about historical works which evoke that period.