'The face was quite unfamiliar to her, and yet not strange. She had not known till this moment what face to expect'.
A Clergyman's Daughter is George Orwell's least well-known, most unappreciated novel. Drawing on his experiences as a hop-picker, teacher, and urban vagrant, it tells the peculiar story of Dorothy Hare, the daughter of the Rector of St Athelstan's in the fictional town of Knype Hill. Unacknowledged by her absent-minded father and gossiped about by his rheumatic parishioners, Dorothy is suddenly and traumatically catapulted into the unknown. She wakes up in London, her memory
temporarily gone; travels to the Kentish countryside; spends a night in Trafalgar Square; works for the authoritarian schoolteacher Mrs Creevy; and then journeys back to her old, limited life. A novel about loss and return, A Clergyman's Daughter charts the course of a young woman's voyage out and circular homecoming.
In his introduction to the novel, Nathan Waddell lays out the fantastical elements and socio-political dimensions of A Clergyman's Daughter and examines how it drew inspiration from James Joyce's epic modernist novel Ulysses, a book Orwell deeply admired.
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Nathan Waddell is a Senior Lecturer in Early Twentieth-Century and Modernist Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Modern John Buchan (2009), Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900-1920 (2012), and Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (2019); a co-editor of essay volumes on utopianism, the work of Wyndham Lewis, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; and the
editor of The Cambridge Companion to 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' (forthcoming).