The thing that had happened to her was commonplace enough – almost every week one reads in the newspapers of a similar case. A man disappears from home, is lost sight of for days or weeks, and presently fetches up at a police station or in a hospital, with no notion of who he is or where he has come from. As a rule it is impossible to tell how he has spent the intervening time; he has been wandering, presumably, in some hypnotic or somnambulistic state in which he has nevertheless been able to pass for normal. In Dorothy’s case only one thing is certain, and that is that she had been robbed at some time during her travels; for the clothes she was wearing were not her own, and her gold cross was missing.
- Read the first chapter of A Clergyman’s Daughter (courtesy of Penguin Books)
- Buy A Clergyman’s Daughter (Penguin Books)
Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, ostensibly follows the eponymous Dorothy Hare as an attack of amnesia takes her into poverty, a police cell and employment at a school for girls. But many of the episodes – the homeless night on Trafalgar Square, hop-picking, school-teaching – are also thinly disguised reportage of Orwell’s own experiences.