A Clergyman's Daughter

Rating:
Summary: A thought-provoking book
Review: 'A Clergyman's Daughter' by George Orwell (1935)

A clever portrait, through five chapters (with sub-chapters), of the young adult life of Dorothy Hare and those she comes into contact with.

As the book opens, Dorothy is the religiously-obsessed, oppressed and overworked 27 year-old spinster daughter of the Rector of St Athelstans in Knype Hill, Suffolk. The story of her life over the next eight months unfolds and develops from there...

This book is excellently written and is an enjoyable read from start to finish: writing of high quality touching on many of the usual themes that concern George Orwell, such as rural life, religion, education, poverty, humanity, London life, loneliness, struggling within life, human nature, greed, selfishness, etc: themes which tend to run through most of Orwell's various writings in one form or another.

Orwell cleverly changes the setting and nature of the book entirely, between each of the five long chapters, making the book in fact five separate and different phases within eight months of Dorothy's life within a book, thereby keeping the reader interested throughout by the use of clever shifts in the setting of the story through to the end, to avoid any risk of boring the reader.

We are left, at the end of the book, to decide what we think about Dorothy, having seen how she has negotiated what has happened to her in the interim and the choices she makes about her future life having regard to those events.

4/5

Rating:
Summary: Orwell's weakest novel
Review: A Clergyman's Daughter is George Orwell's second novel and probably his weakest effort of the six. The story follows along a particularly low portion of the life of Dorothy, whose father is, as we might have guessed, the local preacher. But rather than give us a proper story, Orwell has simply placed Dorothy in a number of situations intended to point out the various flaws in British society of the thirties.

In the first portion, we see Dorothy as she goes about her normal life. She's in her twenties, unmarried (and determined to stay that way), and her life revolves around her family and church duties. Her father is a typical cold clergyman with no particular personality other than being ornery and selfish, small of mind and devoid of imagination. Poor Dorothy spends her entire waking life engaged in chores at home, in the church, and in the community. She's pulled in ten directions at once, but puts up with it all without complaint, buoyed only by her faith. Her only diversion is the infrequent visitation she makes to a local middle aged rogue, who spends most of his time trying to seduce her and turn her away from religion. Why she visits him several times a year at all is never made clear.

Then suddenly Dorothy loses her memory, by means never explained, and finds herself wandering down a street in another town with no idea who she is. In time she hooks up with wandering laborers and finds herself picking hops in some kind of work camp. Again, we get long descriptions of the deprived life of the laborer and inequities in British society, but Dorothy just works without complaint. Finally the season is over, she sees an article about her disappearance and remembers who she is, and so she wires home for money. But her father no longer trusts her, so she ends up homeless in London.

Now we get to hear about life on the streets and the various `colorful' characters that make up the hobo community. Dorothy, of course, handles everything without complaint. She doesn't seem to like complaining much throughout the story. She's basically there to observe things for the reader. Here Orwell is at his weakest as a writer. We even get to read twelve pages of conversation fragments among the tramps, all interspersed at odd intervals, and which go absolutely nowhere. Dorothy doesn't complain, but I'd sure like to. It's strange that Orwell makes this so weak considering he lived the life himself once. For a far better account of such things, see his Down and Out in Paris and London. But here we do not get a good account, we basically get preaching.

Next Dorothy acquires a job as teacher at a girls school, one whose purpose is to teach handwriting and little more, while keeping girls at their desks until they're grown and stifling their personalities. Need I say that Orwell comments extensively on British education here? Ironically this is Orwell's strongest portion of the book because Dorothy actually develops some sort of personality and will of her own. She ends up liking teaching and she tries to actually educate the girls in some fashion. She begins to actually think for herself. She drops her faith in God, realizing she's given no thought to religion since her ordeals began and now realizes it's pointless. But in the end, big surprise, her teaching efforts come to nothing. The parents are horrified that their girls are learning things for which they have no use.

Finally, as Dorothy loses her job, her father has a change of heart and she journeys back home. Everything is more or less as before. She plans to continue her life as it is until her father dies and then become an old maid, probably as a schoolmistress at a better school. No return to religious belief, but otherwise a return to normalcy. And why not? Orwell's completed his grand tour of social observations, so there's no reason to keep poor Dorothy in miserable surroundings. She can return home to her original miserable surroundings.

There's not a lot of insight to be found here. Orwell's observations can be found elsewhere, and in better form. His non-fictional works are far better and conveying his opinions. I mean, the guy actually lived an interesting life. He was homeless, and he did work at lousy jobs. He fought in wars. So read something autobiographical for a more honest sounding account of life. For fiction, all of his other works are superior to this. Burmese Days is clumsy, but has a plot. His later works show greater sophistication. A Clergyman's Daughter is just so much fluff and but for its famous author would surely be long forgotten by now.


Rating:
Summary: Simply average
Review: A clergyman's daughter, a plain girl, Mysterisously disappears with the town hoodlum and then loses her memory. This is the story of her life after this occurrs. It is not all I had come to expect from Orwell but it is an enjoyable book that keeps you reading for more. Read only if you are a die hard Orwell fan and then only if you are willing to accept a so-so work. Otherwise you can read it but don't expect to be blown away.

Rating:
Summary: Definitely Not Kansas
Review: It is interesting when thinking of the protagonist in this novel to compare her to Dorothy of The Wizard of OZ. She mysteriously wakes up far away from her home and her claustrophobic small town life. But, unlike Dorothy of Kansas who finds a world of magical wonder, Orwell's Dorothy finds a bleak world of late-industrial England where people are left to survive in the dark corners and from the scraps they can find. It is an adventurous tale of a young woman's survival, but it is also a ripe opportunity for Orwell to critique the social condition of England's underclass. The comments are poignantly made. Orwell also finds his an interesting way to incorporate some stylistic techniques in his fiction that he hasn't explored before. The scene where Dorothy is trying to survive on the streets is written in dramatic dialogue. This creates a greater physical intimacy with the situation that is dramatically created in the mind of the reader. It also enables immediacy with repetitious dialogue like Dorothy's obsession with how cold the cold can be. Like Dorothy of Kansas's journey, this is meant to be a journey of self-discovery. It is up to the reader to decide whether she has learned anything. It is one of Orwell's best novels, though not his most subtle.

Rating:
Summary: One of Orwell's Best
Review: Knowing what was finally going to come of Dorothy kept me until 2:30 AM this morning...and I wasn't disappointed.

Orwell cheats right out of the chute: In realizing that he may not know enough about women to write about our protagonist, he immediatedly removes her sexuality by telling us she is disgusted by the thought of "that." Nuff said. Our hero(ine) is now pretty much asexual.

What a story though. Plumbing the depths of faith and predestiny, Orwell weaves a fairly heavy tale of the motherless daugther of a grim and dispassionate minister obsessed only with his investments and petty theological particulars.

The minister's daughter loyally fills in the gaps, acting as the heart and soul of a failling church, praying her way against impossible odds while visiting the sick, recruiting new church goers, seeing to the buildings and her father's meals...and eventually completely wigging out.

Now the fun begins.

This is a warm and rewarding book, full of human insight and only a little bit of Orwell's patented socialist soap-boxing.

Rating:
Summary: Uneven, recommended for specialists
Review: Orwell's early fiction is largely overlooked by the public, and while I'm a big Orwell fan myself, I wouldn't say that this situation necessarily needs rectifying. Orwell himself repudiated his early novels. He saw their flaws as well as anyone. One of the worst things that happened to Orwell the apprentice novelist was that he read Joyce's "Ulysses" and understood it; like many a young novelist since, he allowed himself to be seduced by Joyce's masterful prose and massive erudition and was driven to try and emulate it. Of course, only James Joyce can write like James Joyce, and we can see in "A Clergyman's Daughter" examples of what happens when lesser powers try it, such as "Larks also chanting, choirs of larks invisible, dripping music from the sky." Orwell's prose can be quite good at the same time ("In honour of the parents' visit, a fire composed of three large coals was sulking in the grate"), but "A Clergyman's Daughter" is overall a failure, with improbable deus-ex-machina plot manipulations and poorly-handled literary allusions crowding each other on every page. If you're not a big Orwell fan, I'd recommend you take a pass on this one.

Rating:
Summary: Poignant, Evocative, and Only Slightly Flawed
Review: Upon mention of George Orwell, "A Clergyman's Daugter" isn't usually the book that jumps into reader's minds, and compared to his polished masterpieces -- Animal Farm and 1984 -- the reason is understandable. Yet for fans of Orwell lies an undiscovered gem, a less understated yet deliciously piercing satire of early 20th Century England, flavored abundatly with the author's trademark social criticism and wicked humor. It's a book that leaves no stone unturned, challenging religion, gender, education, social class, and both the timely and timeless inadequacies and hypocrasies of which Orwell bore witness.

The book's title refers, fittingly enough, to the chief protagonist, Dorothy Hare. A girl in her late twenties, she begins the book as a militant religious devotee, shown best in a pin she always keeps with her, used for pricking herself in penance for committing the slightest misdeed -- sometimes drawing blood for thinking no more than an unholy thought. She is one daughter among "ten thousand others" who lives a grueling life under the stern command of her father, the pastor, a hardened man of stern disposition and resolute aloofness, whose awkening greeting to his daugter as the novel begins is a question of when breakfast will arrive.

With a misadventure that begins here and ends in a place both similar and entirely different, Dorothy meets affrronts to her life, her stature, her class, even the very faith upon which the whole of her existence resides. And as Dorothy is challenged to think of the world differently, so are we; a defining moment comes when she says, "it is not what we do that matters, it is how our thinking changes because of it." As a theme to the novel and a thesis which he brilliantly defends, Orwell succeeds without hesitation. (As a note, the above quote is paraphrased, and I appologize -- I've already returned the book to the library.)

Where he falters -- and indeed he does -- is in the structure of the novel and, occasionally, the consistency of his language. The myriad of poetic prose almost seems to contradict his otherwise honed and scathing wit, and while often pleasing to the ear, his effors seem at best superfluous, essentially inconcequential to his underlying message. Other reviewers speak with further clarity on this topic, and I'm particularly inclined with one's opinion that only "Joyce can write like Joyce," in other words, that Orwell's language in "A Clergyman's Daughter" could at the least be called affected.

But these gripes on language aside, Orwell succeeds in painting a stark, grim, yet gripping picture of a society gone awry, and beckons us to look within.

Rating:
Summary: Poignant, Evocative, and Only Slightly Flawed
Review: Upon mention of George Orwell, "A Clergyman's Daugter" isn't usually the book that jumps into reader's minds, and compared to his polished masterpieces -- Animal Farm and 1984 -- the reason is understandable. Yet for fans of Orwell lies an undiscovered gem, a less understated yet deliciously piercing satire of early 20th Century England, flavored abundatly with the author's trademark social criticism and wicked humor. It's a book that leaves no stone unturned, challenging religion, gender, education, social class, and both the timely and timeless inadequacies and hypocrasies of which Orwell bore witness.

The book's title refers, fittingly enough, to the chief protagonist, Dorothy Hare. A girl in her late twenties, she begins the book as a militant religious devotee, shown best in a pin she always keeps with her, used for pricking herself in penance for committing the slightest misdeed -- sometimes drawing blood for thinking no more than an unholy thought. She is one daughter among "ten thousand others" who lives a grueling life under the stern command of her father, the pastor, a hardened man of stern disposition and resolute aloofness, whose awkening greeting to his daugter as the novel begins is a question of when breakfast will arrive.

With a misadventure that begins here and ends in a place both similar and entirely different, Dorothy meets affrronts to her life, her stature, her class, even the very faith upon which the whole of her existence resides. And as Dorothy is challenged to think of the world differently, so are we; a defining moment comes when she says, "it is not what we do that matters, it is how our thinking changes because of it." As a theme to the novel and a thesis which he brilliantly defends, Orwell succeeds without hesitation. (As a note, the above quote is paraphrased, and I appologize -- I've already returned the book to the library.)

Where he falters -- and indeed he does -- is in the structure of the novel and, occasionally, the consistency of his language. The myriad of poetic prose almost seems to contradict his otherwise honed and scathing wit, and while often pleasing to the ear, his effors seem at best superfluous, essentially inconcequential to his underlying message. Other reviewers speak with further clarity on this topic, and I'm particularly inclined with one's opinion that only "Joyce can write like Joyce," in other words, that Orwell's language in "A Clergyman's Daughter" could at the least be called affected.

But these gripes on language aside, Orwell succeeds in painting a stark, grim, yet gripping picture of a society gone awry, and beckons us to look within.

Rating:
Summary: I enjoyed this book
Review: While The Clergyman's Daughter may not be 1984 it is still an amazing piece of literature. Orwell's satirical look at England through the eyes of a fanatically pious woman is amazing. He points out alot of social, religous and personal issues without being preachy. Trough it all you care about the fate of Dorathy Hare and that makes the end a little unsettling. Although, the story is sometimes to "convinient" and it is not as powerful and gripping as Orwell's other works I think any true Orwell fans will like this book.