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Loading... A Clergyman's Daughterby George Orwell
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. http://happyantipodean.blogspot.com/2...  Antipodean | Nov 22, 2008 |  3611. A Clergyman's Daughter, by George Orwell (read 8 Aug 2002) This book (the ninth I've read by Orwell) was first published in 1935, but I don't think it was published in the US until after Orwell's death in 1950. The attitude in this book, about Anglican church life, is of the opposite side thereof to Barbara Pym's fetching accounts of such. Orwell is an atheist and hostile to organized religion, but while he has his protagonist lose her faith he also shows how lost and meaningless life is without faith. So I don't think the story really downgrades faith as Orwell intended. Orwell really finds little good to say about anything--there is nothing in the book but down-putting, but the book has power and is thought-provoking but its most powerful message to me is to show the barrenness of life without God. I now believe I have read all Orwell's fiction. (  ) Schmerguls | Nov 18, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0141184655, Paperback)At the distance of a half-century, this satiric social fiction is both a treasure and a disappointment. Orwell's wit is priceless--and ruthless--as he describes rural Church of England parish life; the transitory culture of the hops harvest; a brothel's soiled linen; not to mention when his heroine hobnobs with the Trafalgar Square homeless of a bitter winter's night or bullies bored students in a fourth-rate private school: "Last term the girls had behaved badly, because she had started by treating them as human beings, and later on, when the lessons that interested them were discontinued, they had rebelled like human beings. But if you are obliged to teach children rubbish, you must not treat them as human beings.... Before all else, you must teach them it is more painful to rebel than to obey."Orwell's compassion for Dorothy Hare, ensnared by faith, birth, and gender to toil thanklessly as her minister father's unpaid curate, is admirable, and his evocation, early in the novel, of a woman's consciousness totally subsumed by the mostly trivial demands of others stands shoulder to shoulder with the best feminist fiction. The dialogues between Dorothy and her dissolute middle-aged suitor, Mr. Warburton, concerning human nature, faith, and morality, are smart and fun to read. The problem (and here Orwell commits the sort of sin he denounces in Dickens) is that the novel's plot--Dorothy's picaresque amnesiac travels through the seamy side of English life--feels manufactured for the author's satiric purposes. Orwell never relinquishes his cleverness, or his maleness, to become his heroine, with the result that the reader never surrenders wholly to the fiction. Thus A Clergyman's Daughter, while a pleasure to pick up, is not quite a book one can't put down. --Joyce Thompson (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:53 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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