The Clerk's Daughter is the third book by English novelist George Orwell. It was published in London in 1935 and again in New York in 1936. Orwell had previously published his autobiographical book, *A Life of Hardship and Poverty in Paris and London* (1933), and his novel, *Burma Days* (1934). The Clerk's Daughter is about an English girl named Dorothy Hare, who lives a life of poverty and deprivation in the home of her tyrannical father, who does not think about her happiness and tends to ignore all unpleasant facts, such as his mounting debts to the grocer and the butcher. His poverty has imprisoned him in the age of Lenin and the Daily Mail. In Orwell's own words, he cannot keep up with the new age, the age of scientists and atheist philosophers such as Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell, as Victor Stone, one of the characters in the novel, calls them. Dorothy leaves her safe home to join some vagrants in the second chapter of the novel, collecting hops, just as Orwell did. During her absence, she loses her memory for a period of time. It is a heartwarming life drama as Dorothy, after recovering her memory, struggles to start anew her shattered life. However, this experience has greatly weakened her beliefs. Previously, she had been a staunch religious believer, and had acted in the place of her lazy priest father to oversee the parish and minister to it. But the vagrancy that followed her loss of memory eroded her faith, and from her ordeal she learned a practical lesson: belief and disbelief in religion are two sides of the same coin. Some critics have noted that the novel's opening sentence resembles the opening of Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis": "Waking one morning from troubled dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." The Reverend's Daughter's opening sentence: "Dorothy was startled awake from the clutches of a complicated, disturbing dream when the alarm clock above the dresser went off like a small, resounding bomb with a metallic bell. She lay on her back staring into the darkness, completely exhausted."