A Clergyman’s Daughter

"A Clergyman’s Daughter is a very odd book. What I mean by this is that it’s the only one of Orwell’s novels that actually has a central female character rather than a man. She’s called Dorothy Hare, and she’s a late-20-something spinster who lives with her rather tyrannical old father in a Suffolk country town called Knype Hill, a very thinly-disguised version of Southwold on the Suffolk coast, where Orwell lived on and off with his parents. In the book, Dorothy literally loses her sense of herself and wakes up three days later as a down-and-out, walking with a group of tramps down to Kent. She comes back to London, endures a night in Trafalgar Square with the down-and-outs, and is then more or less rescued by one of her father’s relatives, and ends up teaching in a dreadful private school in West London, before, in the end, going back to live in her father’s vicarage. It’s a fascinating novel, because what Orwell is essentially doing is taking various different parts of his own life—living in Suffolk, the tramping adventures, teaching in dreadful private schools (which is what he did to earn a living in the early 1930s)—and he’s stitching them all together in a story about somebody else. The great fascination to me of A Clergyman’s Daughter is that although it’s published in the UK in 1935, it is essentially the same plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four , which doesn’t appear until fourteen years later. It’s about somebody who is spied upon, and eavesdropped upon, and oppressed by vast exterior forces they can do nothing about. It makes an attempt at rebellion and then has to compromise. The last scene of A Clergyman’s Daughter has Dorothy back in her father’s rectory in Suffolk, still doing the mundane, routine tasks that she was doing at the start of the novel, having rebelled against the life she’s enmeshed in still. Just like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four , she’s had to come to a kind of accommodation with it. It’s a very prophetic novel in terms of what came later in Orwell’s writing. “Although A Clergyman’s Daughter is published in the UK in 1935, it is essentially the same plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four ” In personal terms, it’s the novel of his I read first when I was in my early teens, which is when I first read Orwell. (I wrote a biography of him that came out in 2003; I’ve just written a short book, purportedly a biography of Nineteen Eighty-Four , and also just signed up to write another biography of Orwell that will come out in 2023, simply because there is so much new material in terms of letters, correspondence, and other material.) My mother had a row of paperbacks, and one was the first Penguin paperback of A Clergyman’s Daughter . I read it at the age of 12 or 13, and the narrative voice just spoke to me in a way that no other novel previously had, even though it was written about a woman living in Suffolk 40 years before. ‘He knows all about me,’ I thought to myself, ‘he wrote this specially for me’, which is what Orwell himself wrote when he first read the American writer Henry Miller. That’s why I’ve always loved A Clergyman’s Daughter , despite what it could be argued are a number of structural imperfections. The third chapter in the third part of the novel, which is set at night when they’re all sitting on benches in Trafalgar Square, is very much based on the Nighttown scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses , so you’re quite right to detect that influence. He almost repudiated it. He didn’t want it reprinted in his lifetime. He said the same of Keep the Aspidistra Flying , the novel he wrote after A Clergyman’s Daughter . Although at the time there are letters where he says he’s sweated blood over it to try to make a work of art, in later life he would say that they were just written for money. I think that’s too self-deprecating. In the context of what was being written in Britain in the 1930s, they’re rather old-fashioned novels, almost Edwardian in their outlook. They’re more like Arnold Bennett than the great 1930s modernist masters. But to me, they’re excellent novels in their own right, and they’re also seriously prophetic about what Orwell is going to write in the 1940s. They work on both levels. You can’t really consider the genesis of Nineteen Eighty-Four without thinking of A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying ."