BOOK REVIEW - A Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell

Written more like a screenplay than a novel, with five distinct acts and narration which ‘breaks the fourth wall,’ Orwell is said to have dismissed this early (1935) novel as “bollocks” – not a word that would be in the vocabulary of the titular anti-heroine, Dorothy Hare.

The epigraph to the book “The trivial round, the common task” is taken from the hymn ‘New every morning is the love’ and provides an appropriate synopsis of the life of The Clergyman’s Daughter, who starts each day anew with the same repetitive list of chores; visiting the sick and the lonely, reading to the women’s guild, fetching prescriptions, struggling to raise money for church repairs all the while carefully avoiding the growing list of creditors to whom her aloof and pompous priestly father is indebted.

But her life is turned upside down after she reluctantly agrees to visit the lecherous “Have some madeira m’dear” Mr Warburton one evening, before he leaves for a trip to Europe (only to reappear in the final chapter as a kind of Senior Tempter in the style of C.S.Lewis’s Screwtape). After leaving his house she loses her memory and finds herself, nine days later, destitute on the streets of London, unaware that the “scandal” of her disappearance (and that of Mr Warburton) has been smeared by a tell-tale neighbour over the front pages of the tabloids.

In the following three chapters, or scenes, we walk with Dorothy on her journey of rediscovery. Along the way we meet a book-full of caricatures; Nobby, the loveable rogue who walks Dorothy to Kent to find casual work during the hop-picking season, the motley crew of homeless souls camping on the freezing benches in Trafalgar Square and the grimacing sour-faced owner of the private school to which Dorothy is sent as a teacher by her bumbling Bullingdon-club uncle after she is found. These familiar figures are used by Orwell to draw us in to his stinging commentary on contemporary issues such as the state of the education system and the economy, homelessness and the church.

Physically, Dorothy’s journey ends where she began, in the kitchen of the Suffolk rectory, making costumes for the next school play with a pot of glue melting on the stove. Spiritually, however, we are encouraged, through the reappearance of Mr Warburton, to view Dorothy not now as a devout servant of the Lord but as an “Anglican atheist” (a term that may have described Orwell himself?) Warburton tempts her with the offer of a life of freedom away from her parish work, but Dorothy explains that this work is useful, even if it means “saying prayers that one doesn’t believe in” or “teaching children things that one doesn’t always think are true.” Orwell explains that “her cosmos, though now it seemed to her empty and meaningless, was still in a sense the Christian cosmos.”

In the closing pages, Dorothy prays to God to help her unbelief but finds no solace in prayer. She is brought back to the present by the smell of the glue on the stove, when Orwell breaks through the ‘fourth wall’ for the final time;

“The smell of glue was the answer to her prayer. She did not know this. She did not reflect, consciously, that the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable.”

But the question of her faith or lack of it is never one that Dorothy answers for herself. Certainly, she seems to find less value in ritual by the end of the book and finds it difficult to pray – but her return to her work in the parish is set before us – like the reminder of the smell of the glue – as an inexplicable bond – a bond of love?  

Many mystics and spiritual writers have sought meaning in the state of hopelessness and emptiness that they have felt. St John of the Cross described this ‘dark night of the soul’ as an essential part of the spiritual journey.

For some, this dark night can engulf years. Correspondence between Mother Teresa and her confessors which came to light after her death revealed that she spent most of her life feeling no presence of God whatsoever. At times she even doubted the existence of God. In 1979 she wrote to Reverend Michael van de Peet “Jesus has a very special love for you [but] as for me, the silence and emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see – Listen and do not hear – the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak…I want you to pray for me…that I let Him have a free hand.”

Thomas Merton suggested that it is through this dark night that we come close to knowing the God who is unknowable, not through objective thought but by awareness that our lives are penetrated by his being – awareness of God’s loving presence - like Dorothy Hare’s glue bubbling on the stove.

New every morning is the love

our wakening and uprising prove;

through sleep and darkness safely brought,

restored to life and power and thought.

New mercies, each returning day,

hover around us while we pray;

new perils past, new sins forgiven,

new thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.

If on our daily course our mind

be set to hallow all we find,

new treasures still, of countless price,

God will provide for sacrifice.

The trivial round, the common task,

will furnish all we need to ask,

room to deny ourselves, a road

to bring us daily nearer God.

Only, O Lord, in thy dear love

fit us for perfect rest above;

and help us, this and every day,

to live more nearly as we pray.

(John Keble)

Links

Time Magazine – Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith
New Every Morning – Text