A Clergyman's Daughter

Dorothy Hare is the twenty-seven-year-old only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan's Church in the small Suffolk town of Knype Hill. Published in 1935, the novel follows Dorothy through a year of upheaval that strips away the foundations of her life and forces her to rebuild it without the faith that once sustained her.

Dorothy's days begin at half past five with a punishing routine of self-denial: cold baths, household chores, and a ceaseless round of parish duties mapped out on a "memo list." At early-morning Communion, she struggles to concentrate on her prayers and drives a glass-headed pin into her forearm as penance for wandering thoughts, a ritual of self-mortification that has left her skin spotted with tiny red marks. Her father, the grandson of a baronet, is aloof and irritable, having reduced his congregation from six hundred to under two hundred through personal coldness and stubborn adherence to old-fashioned High Anglicanism. He gives Dorothy eighteen pounds a month for all household expenses yet refuses to acknowledge the mounting debts, dismissing her pleas while investing his dwindling capital in speculative shares.

Dorothy's morning rounds introduce the pressures surrounding her. Mr Warburton, a forty-eight-year-old bachelor of independent income who lives openly with a mistress and has three illegitimate children, invites Dorothy to his house that evening under the false pretext that other guests will be present. Mrs Semprill, the town's most prolific scandalmonger, intercepts Dorothy with lurid gossip and calls after her with pointed warnings about Mr Warburton. Dorothy also visits Mrs Pither, an elderly parishioner whose absolute faith in a concrete, physical Heaven produces a strange unease in Dorothy.

That evening Dorothy arrives at Mr Warburton's house to find no other guests. Too tired to leave, she stays while he goads her about her religious beliefs, arguing she cannot genuinely believe in Hell or the afterlife. When she tries to go, he takes her by the shoulders; she wrenches free in visible distress, revealing a deep physical aversion to male touch. At the gate he forces a kiss on her cheek, and the sound of a window shutting in Mrs Semprill's house confirms they have been observed. The narrative explains the roots of Dorothy's aversion: childhood memories of scenes between her parents and a terror of satyrs aroused by old engravings left a permanent dread of physical intimacy. She once refused a curate named Francis Moon whom she would otherwise have married; he died of pneumonia a year later. Back in the conservatory, Dorothy resolves never to visit Mr Warburton again and works on costumes for the school play past midnight.

After an interregnum of approximately eight days, Dorothy regains consciousness on the New Kent Road in London with no memory of who she is. She is wearing unfamiliar clothes, her gold cross is missing, and newspaper posters announce "Fresh Rumours about Rector's Daughter." Three young vagrants propose she join them going hop-picking in Kent: Nobby, a cheerful, orange-haired ex-burglar; Charlie, a sullen cockney; and Flo, a plump, silly girl. Dorothy, giving her name as "Ellen," agrees.

Three grueling days of tramping follow. Nobby's promised job proves a lie, and the group must walk roughly 35 miles, begging and stealing food. Charlie and Flo eventually desert, taking all the supplies. After repeated rejections at different farms, Dorothy and Nobby are finally hired and Dorothy collapses into a straw-filled hut. The hop-picking routine absorbs her completely. Despite the exhaustion, there is an unreasonable happiness in the work: warm afternoons, the bitter scent of hops, constant singing around the bins. The kindness of fellow pickers sustains Dorothy during her first penniless days, and her identity problem fades almost entirely as the narrowing of consciousness to the present minute keeps her in a dreamlike state.

The trance breaks when Nobby is arrested for stealing apples. Dorothy retrieves a copy of Pippin's Weekly and reads a story, based on Mrs Semprill's account, alleging that she eloped with Mr Warburton. Her memory floods back. She writes repeatedly to her father, but he never replies. She also registers, briefly, that she has not prayed since leaving home and no longer feels the impulse to do so. Deciding she cannot return to Knype Hill, she resolves to go to London after the picking ends.

In London, Dorothy's descent into destitution is swift. Landladies refuse her because she has no luggage; employers reject her because her educated accent marks her as a gentlewoman who must be "in trouble." She rents a room at a squalid lodging house and applies for 18 jobs without success. When her money runs out, she drifts toward Trafalgar Square. Chapter III, written entirely as a play script, depicts a single night among London's homeless: Dorothy huddles with a dozen others through stages of increasing cold, shared tea, and periodic harassment by policemen. Among them are Mrs McElligot, a Dublin Irishwoman, and Mr Tallboys, a disgraced former rector who chants blasphemous parodies of prayers. Dorothy endures nine more days of this existence before being arrested for begging and spending a night in a cell, feeling mainly relief at being in a clean, warm place.

The Rector, it emerges, received Dorothy's letters but never believed her account of amnesia. He eventually wrote to his cousin, Sir Thomas Hare, a baronet embarrassed by sharing the surname in the newspaper headlines. Sir Thomas's solicitor arranges a teaching position at Ringwood House Academy, a girls' day school run by Mrs Creevy, a lean, hard woman whose only interest in the school is the fees. She categorizes her 21 pupils into "good payers," "medium payers," and "bad payers," instructing Dorothy to discipline each group accordingly. Dorothy's first morning reveals that the children know virtually nothing. When they present her with a pathetic bunch of chrysanthemums bought with their pooled fourpence, she resolves to make the school a decent place.

Dorothy introduces genuine teaching: Shakespeare, a plasticine contour map of Europe, and real instruction in arithmetic and French grammar. The children respond with enthusiasm. But the crisis arrives when the class reaches a passage in Macbeth and half the children go home asking their parents what "womb" means. An outraged deputation of parents descends on the school. Mrs Creevy orders Dorothy to abandon all innovations and return to mechanical methods, explaining that fees are all that matter. Dorothy obeys. On the last day of the Easter term, Mrs Creevy fires her without notice, having secretly hired a replacement.

At that moment a telegram from Mr Warburton arrives: Mrs Semprill has been discredited by a libel suit, Dorothy's reputation is restored, and her father wants her home. On the train to Knype Hill, Mr Warburton proposes marriage, painting a devastating picture of Dorothy's future as a fading, penniless parson's daughter. Dorothy almost agrees, but when he pulls her close, her old horror of physical contact returns and she wrenches free. She tells him she intends to return to parish work despite her lost faith, reasoning that the Christian way of life is still what comes naturally to her and that pretending to believe is less selfish than openly undermining others' belief.

Back in Knype Hill, Dorothy finds the parish in chaos and throws herself into restoring order. Her father greets her as though she had been gone for a weekend and immediately asks her to type his sermon. Alone in the conservatory, preparing costumes for a new pageant, she kneels and attempts to pray, but the words are useless. At that moment the smell of warming glue penetrates her nostrils and the clock strikes six, jolting her back to the work at hand. The narrator observes that the smell of glue is the answer to her prayer: By accepting that there is no solution to the problem of faith and simply getting on with the job before her, the question fades into insignificance. Dorothy returns to her memo list and pastes strip after strip of brown paper onto Julius Caesar's breastplate with absorbed concentration, in the penetrating smell of the glue-pot.