“It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith …as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind”

Stifled by the smallness and narrow minded constraints of her father’s religious vocation and its associated life-smothering procedurals, Dorothy Hare, our title character and chief protagonist, experiences a disquieting and amnesiac mental breakdown.

Through narrative fiction, Orwell takes on religion, systemic poverty and the degradation and corruption of privately funded education (England, circa 1935). Somewhat experimental in nature—one chapter reads as though it were lifted from Joyce’s Ulysses—this was, by all accounts, Orwell’s least favorite novel. He even went so far as to call it “tripe!” and “bollocks!” Personally, I rather enjoyed it.