
A Clergyman's Daughter
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Narrated by:
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Richard Brown
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By:
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George Orwell
Dorothy Hare, the dutiful daughter of a rector in Suffolk, spends her days performing good works and cultivating good thoughts, pricking her arm with a pin when a bad thought arises. She does her best to reconcile her father’s fanciful view of his position in the world with such realities as the butcher’s bill. But even Dorothy’s strength has its limits, and one night, as she works feverishly on costumes for the church-school play, she blacks out. When she comes to, she finds herself on a London street, clad in a sleazy dress and unaware of her identity.
After a series of degrading adventures - picking hops in Kent, sleeping among the down-and-outers in Trafalgar Square, spending a night in jail, and teaching in a grubby day school for girls - she is rescued. But although she regains her life as a clergyman’s daughter, she has lost her faith.
©1936 Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell (P)1991 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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Good story, solid narration
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Defy Orwell’s wishes, read this book
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It’s really like several different books not very well pasted together. It starts out like Arnold Bennett’s “Anna of the Five Towns,” with the small-town heroine’s monster of a father — selfish, snobbish, lazy, callous, dishonest — not very different from the skinflint father in “Anna.” Then, quite implausibly and without even an attempt at a convincing explanation, it shifts to a tale reminiscent of parts of “The Grapes of Wrath,” obviously drawing upon Orwell’s own experience as an ill-paid itinerant agricultural worker. There’s a strange, unpleasant nighttime scene using a medley of voices that sounds like “The Beggar’s Opera.” And then the story shifts again to a rather nasty, somewhat unpleasant Dickensian satire about English private schools, this one a small bottom-of-the-barrel establishment run by another caricatured monster. (The parents of the students are also caricatured as a pack of idiots.)
It’s all fairly interesting — Orwell is ALWAYS interesting, always worth reading — but it’s definitely not a successful or well-structured or believable work of fiction, and it leaves one feeling pretty unsatisfied.
The narration is especially unsatisfying. I can’t keep track of whether “Richard Brown,” “Joseph Porter,” and “Frederick Davidson” are one and the same person or a couple of different readers who sound the same, but — assuming it’s one person — he’s the very worst reader Orwell could have had (and Davidson is credited with a number of the books): He sounds like a parody of a snobbish, effeminate head waiter and has exactly the sort of exaggeratedly effete accent that Orwell himself detested. Worse, he tends to read every sentence the same, without a trace of understanding: rising UP at the end of every clause, again and again, then DOWN at the end. Bad luck for Orwell.
For confirmed Orwell fans, quite fascinating...
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Dorothy Don’t Go Home!
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Definitely worth a listen.
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Captivating
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― George Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter
Bottom-shelf Orwell, but still pretty good. I'm not sure I enjoyed the ending, but I'm glad Orwell left a small caveat and let this book be printed after his death, if only to benefit his heirs.
Bottom-Shelf Orwell, but still G-D Orwell
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I liked it
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Really not bad Perhaps misunderstood
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Europe Today, as Nietzsche Predicted
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