A Clergyman’s Daughter

The protagonist of Orwell’s novel A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves. Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s however he began to consider himself a socialist though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step—so common in the period—of declaring himself a communist.