A Clergyman's Daughter
Interesting tale with believable characters following a pious young woman who's life is all about doing things for others with the only luxury she has being intellectual chats with an older lecherous man. A fall and rise story ensues prompted by memory loss which I can only deduce was due to glue sniffing albeit inadvertently. We span the mental horrors of being an unmarried woman in your late 20s stuck in a small gossipy town to the seemingly worse physical and life threatening horrors of complete poverty in London. There's much in between too reflecting on the awful social rules of society back then, and most likely that many still live under. Orwell's commentary on social and economic deprivations and differences within society foreshadow his later writings. Religion is also dealt with in a critical manner although in some ways fairly sensitively, maybe Orwell was losing his religion or recently had? The daughter's aversion to men's bodies suggests that she was either completely averse to physical contact with men due to religious views or perhaps she was gay and Orwell couldn't state that in those times. Men as predators also runs through the story. Excellent read that I found hard to put down.
P.S. After seeing a picture of Alice going Through the Looking Glass it struck me that this is Orwell's dystopian version of Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland which instead of consuming mind and body altering substances, including a mushroom, Orwell goes for the harsher drug of glue sniffing, albeit inadvertently, causing a black out whereby our heroine finds herself in the East End with a different set of clothes on. Lord only knows (or so she may have thought) what happened to her original clothes and how she came to be without them.
