good - Rated 
I wouldn't recommend it if your not already an Orwell fan,its a little slow and nothing much happens. She leaves home lives on the street then returns home to the same life she left. the end.
THE CLERGYMANS DAUGHTER - Rated 
I WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED BY THIS BOOK.IT STARTS OFF AT A FAIRLY SLOW PACE BUT STARTS TO GET INTERESTING IN CHAPTER TWO.IT IS WRITTEN IN A TRADITION STYLE AND IS READABLE. GEORGE ORWELL'S POLITICAL VIEWS, ESPECIALLY ABOUT PRIVATE EDUCATION COME THROUGH.I WOULD NOT CALL IT GREAT LITERATURE BUT IT IS WORTH READING.
Come on George, far too little brutality here for the punters. - Rated
Tosh to all the poor reviews here. Every time some retard starts to glory and revel in the past, on a subject as education in the private sector, this is the work I flay them with.
Orwell's experience of the small scale, thruppeny bit 'private' schools of which there were several in each town of 50,000, withn their mentally stunted girl teachers, ruled with a rod of iron by some old harridan, operating from formerly grand Victorian villas? Priceless. The picture of a world thankfully gone, of snobishness, false pride, class stupidity? Worth it's weight in gold.
So Orwell has no torture, no iron shod boot crashing into a face for ever? No Room 101, Miniluv, Minitru or Inner Party here? The legion of spinsters who served widowed fathers such as the lead character, had a taste of Room 101 every day of their lives.
Buy read and learn from history
Fascinating and yet not really very good - Rated 
George Orwell was a great English writer whose reputation has suffered from the tendency in English culture to regard the novel (and the poem) as the supreme test of a writer's worth. Orwell was clearly at his most stimulated and inspired as a writer when he had something urgent to say, but having something urgent to say is not always the best attitude to have when you are trying to write a novel. It certainly wasn't the best attitude for Orwell to have when he wrote this one, considering that when he wrote it he was really beginning to find his vocation as a political writer and that he was also (at the time) impressed and intimidated by the example of Joyce's 'Ulysses', which he'd just read. 'Ulysses' has a political dimension, but it is the work of a very different kind of writer. The result is a fascinating and disjointed mish-mash of a novel, and Orwell knew it; even while he was writing it, he was writing to friends to say that he was making a mess of it.
In spite of this, any fan of Orwell will have a soft spot for 'A Clergyman's Daughter', if only because it's this writer's most conspicuous failure. Some of it, the depiction of the heroine's awful and cramped life as the daughter of a snobbish and mean-minded clergyman, plus the vivid accounts of hop-picking and teaching in a cheap and nasty school, are unforgettable. Against that, you have to cope with the fairly implausible story (why and how does Dorothy lose her memory?), the shallow characterisation and the fairly woeful 'experimental' chapter in which Dorothy attempts to spend a night among the homeless in Trafalgar Square, the whole thing rendered as a clunky pastiche of a chapter in 'Ulysses'.
Orwell tried to digest his own personal experiences into fictional form, and in this case he failed. But it's an honourable failure; the book may not hang together as a fully realised work of art, but not many novels of the period were able to back up their mood of societal disillusionment with such excruciating and convincing detail. If you have never read Orwell, don't start here; try the essays, '1984' and 'Animal Farm', the finest products of his moral and political imagination. If you have read them already, this is a fascinating sidetrack. Orwell was right to think the book not good, but I for one am glad that his wish that it not be reprinted after his death has been disregarded. Dodgy as it is, it's still very interesting.
Disappointing - Rated
I am a great fan of Orwell, but this novel lacks both the biting satire and the compassionate human understanding of his other works. It is of course characteristically well written, but it remains, essentially, a very bleak novel.
Dorothy's life is porteyed as monotonous and unfulfilling in the opening part of the novel, and although the middle sections see dramatic changes, the fact that she chooses to return to it at the end is a real anti-climax. Moreover, she does so having lost her faith, thus adding a new hypocricy to her situation.
The moral of the story here seems to be that if we keep ourselves busy we can forget how meaningless our lives are. Whether true or not, it is not something that I enjoyed reading about. I am no fan of Hollywood style happy endings, but this book left me with a feeling of emptiness, and many hours of my time spent on it. Perhaps Orwell's biting irony here is that he managed to keep me busy for many hours, thus helping to countdown the clock on my supposedly pointless life. Hurrah!
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