A Clergyman's Daughter: Annotated Edition

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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, helping him stave off his creditors and making costumes for fund-raising events. When, after being invited to dinner by Mr Warburton, a local atheist and libertine, she is glimpsed in his arms by the village gossip, Mrs Semprill, Dorothy suffers a breakdown and, struck by amnesia, embarks on journey that will see 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 Clergymans Daughter, first published in 1935, is Orwells second work of fiction and one that, in its depiction of a protagonist who rebels against and is ultimately vanquished by the society that oppresses her, is a clear prefiguration of later novels such as Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Author Bio

Eric Blair (190350), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was a novelist, journalist and critic, best remembered for his seminal novels 1984 and Animal Farm, and for works of non-fiction such as The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.