A Clergyman’s Daughter

A Clergyman’s Daughter is a novel by George Orwell, first published in 1935. Set in early 20th-century England, the book follows Dorothy Hare, the dutiful and deeply conscientious daughter of an Anglican clergyman, whose life is shaped by religious obligation, social respectability, and quiet self-sacrifice. Orwell uses Dorothy’s constrained existence in a small provincial town to explore faith, duty, and the unseen pressures placed on women in respectable society. Dorothy’s carefully ordered world collapses after a sudden crisis leaves her cut off from her former life. Forced into unfamiliar surroundings and stripped of social protection, she experiences England from the margins, encountering poverty, casual cruelty, and the grinding insecurity of those living hand to mouth. As she moves through a series of harsh environments, Orwell examines the gulf between moral ideals and lived reality, questioning how compassion and belief survive under relentless material pressure. The novel combines psychological realism with sharp social observation, revealing Orwell’s growing concern with class injustice, religious doubt, and institutional hypocrisy. Though less overtly political than some of his later work, A Clergyman’s Daughter offers an unflinching portrait of interwar England and the quiet erosion of certainty in a world governed by economic necessity.