A Clergyman’s Daughter

Anyone who thinks white people are all rich, educated and saintly should read this book. It is a critical look at everyday life in rural England around the onset of the 20th Century. The key character is Dorothy, a 28-year-old only-daughter and child of a clergyman in a village-sort of place. Due to an emotional problem in her childhood she’s afraid of men and marriage and all of her time is spent serving her father and the church.

Mr Warburton is thrown in as a twist in the plot. He’s an old immoral bachelor always trying to seduce Dorothy. He manages to get Dorothy to his house one night but his attempt to seduce her fails again. After Dorothy gets home the same night she loses her memory and the next thing we know she’s on a street somewhere without a clue as to whom she is or what she is doing there. She joins the first set of people to speak to her, who happen to be homeless petty thieves, and spends the next weeks trekking with them, begging for money and food and sleeping under trees. This is followed by a life of hop-picking, looking for a job in an alien city of London and, not finding one, having to live in the streets with beggars and sleep at Trafalgar Square.

Back home her disappearance has been broadcast by an old lady rumor-monger as an elopement with Mr Warburton and her father has believed it and doesn’t want her back in shame. Then, through a little twist in the plot, she gets a job as a teacher at a little private school, and the search light switches to how low the quality in these schools could go and how owners’ primary interest was usually making money at the expense of the poor students, and how parents’ words were law since they paid the fees. Dorothy is shocked by the way the private school is run but as time goes by she painfully adjusts to her requirements, not wanting to go back to begging.

She does return home towards the end, and by then she’s changed into a new person. She’s lost her Christian faith, however not the fear of men, and turns down Warburton’s offer of marriage.

April 13, 2015. Review initially written in 1993. Novel first published in 1935. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).