It tells the story of Dorothy Hare, the titular clergyman's daughter, whose life is turned upside down when she suffers an attack of amnesia.

It is Orwell's most formally experimental novel, featuring a chapter written entirely in dramatic form, but he was never satisfied with it and he left instructions that after his death it was not to be reprinted.

Brenda Salkeld, a gym teacher at St Felix School and the daughter of a clergyman, was to remain a friend and regular correspondent about his work for many years, although she rejected his proposal of marriage.

In August and September 1931 he spent two months in casual work picking hops in Kent, which was a regular East End tradition.

In the evening she is invited to dinner by Mr Warburton, Knype Hill's most disreputable resident, a middle-aged bachelor who is an unashamed lecher and atheist.

She joins a group of vagrants, comprising a young man named Nobby and his two friends, who relieve her of her remaining half-crown and take her with them on a hop-picking expedition in Kent.

The vagrants discuss the difficulties of life on the road, including paying for hot water, finding food, avoiding police, and prostitution.

Mr Tallboys, a defrocked minister, performs a mock-religious ritual as Dorothy dreams of "monstrous winged shapes of Demons and Archdemons.

"[8] After spending ten days on the streets, she is arrested for vagrancy and ends up in a police cell for twelve hours for failure to pay the fine.

Hare's solicitor procures a job for her as a schoolmistress in a small "fourth-rate" private girls' "academy" run by the grasping Mrs Creevy.

Dorothy's attempts to introduce a more liberal and varied education to her students clash with the expectations of the parents, who want a strictly "practical" focus on handwriting and basic arithmetic.

Shortly after Dorothy steps out of the door of the school Mr Warburton turns up in a taxi to say that Mrs Semprill has been sued for libel, and that her malicious gossip has been discredited.

Dorothy rejects him, recognising but disregarding his argument that, with her loss of religious faith, her existence as a hard-working clergyman's daughter will be meaningless and dull, and that marriage while she is still young is her only escape.

Dorothy questions her religious beliefs throughout the novel, concluding that there is "no possible substitute for faith; no pagan acceptance of life as sufficient to itself; no pantheistic cheer-up stuff, no pseudo-religion of 'progress' with visions of glittering Utopias and ant-heaps of steel and concrete.

"[9] For Richard Smyer, the novel represents England's "spiritual dryness" in modernity and Dorothy's awareness of the "gap between genuine Christianity and a money-worshipping society [.

[14][12] The poet and novelist Vincent McHugh, reviewing the novel for the New York Herald Tribune Books in 1936, declared that it had affinities with the work of George Gissing, a writer whom Orwell greatly admired, and placed the novel in a particular tradition, that of Dickens and Gissing: "Mr Orwell too writes of a world crawling with poverty, a horrible dun flat terrain in which the abuses marked out by those earlier writers have been for the most part only deepened and consolidated.

The stages of Dorothy's plight – the coming to herself in the London street, the sense of being cut off from friends and the familiar, the destitution and the cold – enact [–] the nightmare in which one may be dropped out of respectable life, no matter how debt-laden and forlorn, into the unthinkable pit of the beggar's hunger and the hopelessly declassed.

"[15] According to Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor:[12] The great fascination to me of A Clergyman’s Daughter is that although it's published in the UK in 1935, it is essentially the same plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which doesn’t appear until fourteen years later.

The last scene of A Clergyman’s Daughter has Dorothy back in her father’s rectory in Suffolk, still doing the mundane, routine tasks that she was doing at the start of the novel, having rebelled against the life she’s enmeshed in still.