A Clergyman's Daughter
George Orwell
 The story is given in five distinctive chapters. A day in the life of Dorothy Hare, the weak-willed daughter of a disagreeable widowed clergyman. Her father is Rector of Knype Hill, a small provincial East Anglian town. She keeps house for him, fends off the trade creditors, visits parishioners and makes costumes for fund-raising events. All the time she practises self-mortification in order to be true to her faith. In the evening she is invited to dinner by Mr Warburton, Knype Hill's most disreputable resident, a middle-aged bachelor and an unashamed lecher and atheist. He attempts to seduce Dorothy, as he has done before more than once. As she leaves he forces another embrace on her, and they are seen by Mrs Semprill, the village gossip and scandal-monger. Dorothy returns home to her conservatory late at night to work on the costumes. Dorothy is transposed to the Old Kent Road with amnesia. Eight days of her life are unaccounted for. 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. Meanwhile, the rumour is spread by Mrs Semprill that Dorothy has eloped with Mr Warbuton, and this story captivates the national press for a while. After hard work in the hop fields, culminating in Nobby's arrest for theft, she returns to London with her negligible earnings. As a single girl with no luggage, she is refused admission at "respectable" hotels and ends up in a cheap hotel for "working-girls" (prostitutes). Her funds are constantly dwindling; ultimately she is forced to leave the hotel and live on the streets, and takes up residence in Trafalgar Square. Dorothy spends the night sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square (in a chapter presented entirely as dramatic dialogue). She is arrested for vagrancy and ends up in a police cell for twelve hours for failure to pay the fine. Dorothy believes that her father, distraught at the rumours of her running away with Mr Warburton, has ignored her letters for help. In actuallity, he has contacted his cousin Sir Thomas Hare in London, whose servant locates her at the police station. Hare's solicitor procures a job for her as a "schoolmistress" in a small "4th 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 mathematics. The work, which initially she enjoyed, quickly becomes a drudgery. Mrs Creevy eventually dismisses her, without notice, when she finds another teacher. 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 charged with libel, and that she and her malicious gossip have been discredited. He has come, therefore, to take her back to Knype Hill. On the trip home, Warburton proposes marriage. 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. The story ends with Dorothy back in her old routine, only without the self-mortification.