'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. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
About the AuthorNathan 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).
ReviewsNathan Waddell ... has made a tremendous contribution to our understanding of one of Orwell's most neglected novels ... Waddell's editing, in fact, amounts to an outstanding scholarly achievement. * Richard Lance Keeble, George Orwell Studies *
Book InformationISBN 9780198848424
Author George OrwellFormat Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Oxford University PressPublisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 224g
Dimensions(mm) 195mm * 128mm * 16mm