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 Clergyman's Daughter
first published in 1935 is Orwell's 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.
