A Clergyman's Daughter

George Orwell's second Novel The Clergyman's Daughter is set on a small town in England where attendance at mass is dwindling and the church is falling into disrepair. The Clergyman is a crotchety old fellow who relied on his daughter for every need-tending to three meals a day, paying the bills,

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assisting the church schoolchildren with their play, and other things that pit incredible demands on her time. She struggles to convince her father to help her by selling off some trinkets so as to pay off certain debts, but he steadfastly refuses. And she faces other worries from a local playboy who tried to seduce her. Soon enough she falls asleep late at night stressed and overdue with work. Before she knows it she is lying on a street in dirty clothes without any memory of where she is or how she got there. From here the tale takes a different direction entirely, with Dorothy struggling to survive as a migrant worker and then as an abused schoolmistress. She suffers the pangs of poverty, and sees what it is truly like for the first time. She learns to pick herself up and adapt to the circumstances, and benefits from her middle class accent and connections to distant but rich relatives. All of this changes Dorothy, who was an obedient but prudent young woman just trying to do right by her father. She learns how hard life is for some, and what it takes to truly survive. In the end she loses her religion, which disconcerts her. But she feels no connection to God after this experience, and struggles to say a meaningful prayer. Dorothy is finally rescued by Mr. Warburton, the local playboy who finds her in hiding and asks her hand in marriage. She returns to her father and to the town where she lived, and falls back in to the daily rhythms of life. The bills start to pile up again, and demands on Dorothy's time begin again to grow. She doesn't avoid this life; she fully accepts it, despite the demands on her and the incredible challenges she has just been through. But Dorothy wants normalcy and predictability in her life, which is what we all want. She forgets the poverty she saw, but then again this makes her life easier.

This third effort by George Orwell is an improvement over his previous novel, Burmese Days, which tried too hard to tell a story. A Clergyman's Daughter again focuses on a single character who struggles with the society around her. It is through her eyes that we see the struggles of poverty, of getting a good education, of social class, of religion, and of a woman's role. Many of these experiences reflect George Orwells's view of how the world operates and reflect his own personal experiences.

I liked this book for its simplicity, although Dorothy was not someone I closely identified with. I felt sorry for her, but disappointed that she didn't change her lifestyle after all she had been through. She was an interesting character, but not one too cheer for in the end.

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