I Capture the Castle
Dodie Smith, 1948
St. Martin's Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312316167
Summary
I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries.
Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has "captured the castle"—and the heart of the reader—in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments. (From the publisher.)
The novel was adapted to film in 2003.
Author Bio
• Birth—May 3 1896
• Where—Lancashire, Enland, UK
• Death—November 24, 1990
• Where—Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
Before Dodie Smith died in 1990, she asked the novelist Julian Barnes to be her literary executor. As Barnes later told The Guardian, "She said she didn't think I'd have much to do as her literary executor—in the last years of her life she was only earning around £12,000 from her books—but since her death her career has revived in a spectacular way."
Indeed it has. Smith was once best known in the United States for her children's book The Hundred and One Dalmatians, which inspired an animated film from Disney—and, later, the live-action movie starring Glenn Close. Her other major work, the 1948 novel I Capture the Castle, was out of print here for many years (though it has always had a following in Britain). But with the book's 1998 reissue, and the 2003 release of a film version from BBC Films, modern readers are rediscovering Dodie Smith.
As a young woman, Smith's first ambition was to be an actress, and she enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Art (later the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) with hopes of going on the stage. But at five feet tall, she was "too short and not attractive enough," in her own words, so she gave up acting and took a job at Heal's in London, where she became the store's toy buyer. She still loved the theater, however, and in 1929 she wrote and sold a very successful play, Autumn Crocus. Smith followed it with several more hit plays, including Dear Octopus, which starred John Gielgud.
During World War II, Smith and her pacifist husband, Alec Beesley, moved to America to avoid the British draft. She wrote screenplays for Paramount and formed "great friendships" with other writers, including Christopher Isherwood. Although Smith missed her home, she and Beesley stayed in America for many years after the war ended—they didn't want to put their Dalmatian dogs through the six months' quarantine that was then required to bring pets into England.
Homesickness helped inspire Smith's first novel, I Capture the Castle, which evokes a peculiarly English version of genteel poverty. The 17-year-old narrator and her family, who live in a dilapidated house built onto a ruined castle, belong to "that odd class of intelligent and cultured people who are also unskilled and unemployable," as Salon writer Charles Taylor put it. From its much-quoted opening sentence ("I write this sitting in the kitchen sink") to its bittersweet ending, Smith's witty coming-of-age tale has captivated adolescent and adult readers alike. Writers from J. K. Rowling and Susan Isaacs to Armistead Maupin and Erica Jong have praised it for the merits Penelope Lively summed up as "a good story, flourishing characters, and the most persuasive narrative voice."
Smith's other well-known work, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, was published in 1958 and is now considered a classic work of children's literature, though not all fans of Disney's 101 Dalmatians realize that the movie was based on a book. (Smith's sequel to Dalmatians, a fantasy titled The Starlight Barking, bears no resemblance to the Disney film sequel 102 Dalmatians). Towards the end of her life, Smith produced four volumes of autobiography: Look Back with Love: A Manchester Childhood, Look Back with Mixed Feelings, Look Back with Astonishment and Look Back with Gratitude.
A few of Smith's plays are still produced occasionally, but she remains best known for I Capture the Castle and The Hundred and One Dalmatians. To Smith's fans, this is no small accomplishment—as Sue Summers pointed out in The Guardian, "Two prose classics in one lifetime is more than most writers achieve."
Extras
Though Smith's books have a cozy, old-fashioned charm, Smith herself was a bit of an iconoclast. After several youthful love affairs, she fell in love with a co-worker, Alec Beesley. For the first few years of their relationship, they lived in separate London flats but shared a weekend cottage in the country. After they married and moved into one house, Smith attributed their years of happy domestic life to their habit of keeping separate bedrooms.
Pongo, the canine hero of The Hundred and One Dalmatians, was named after the first of Smith's own much-loved salmatians. Smith said she began to get ideas for the story after a friend joked that a dalmatian would make a good fur coat.
Disney once planned to film I Capture the Castle as a vehicle for child star Hayley Mills, but script problems kept the movie out of production. Years later, Smith's estate got the movie rights back from Disney in exchange for permission to make a live-action version of 101 Dalmatians. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Ms. Garai [star of 2003 film], who lives in London, read Dodie Smith's canny and resolutely unsentimental 1948 novel...on which the movie was based, when she was 13. ''It's an amazing book to read when you're that age,'' Ms. Garai said ''because you start to realize...it takes a long time to change from girlhood to womanhood. We live in a society where children are expected to become adults overnight. Cassandra's story is about that process taking a long time, and about it being painful.''
Stephanie Zacharek - New York Times
It is an occasion worth celebrating when a sparkling novel, a work of wit, irony, and feeling is brought back into print after an absence of many years. So uncork the champagne for I Capture the Castle.
Los Angeles Times
Dreamy and funny...an odd, shimmering timelessness clings to its pages. A thousand and one cheers for its reissue. A+
Entertainment Weekly
I Capture the Castle is finally back in print. It should be welcomed with a bouquet of roses and a brass band. Ever since I was handed a tattered copy years ago with the recommendation 'You'll love it,' it has been one of my favorite novels.
Susan Issacs (author)
Cassandra Mortmain captures the castle not with trebuchet or battering ram but with her pen. At a low point in the Mortmains' life in their castle, 17-year-old Cassandra begins a journal vividly describing her family's unusual life and her feelings about growing up. She explains how the family discovered their castle home back when they were wealthy and how their wealth and resources dwindled, forcing the Mortmains to sell off all their possessions of value. They become expert at making do with very little but are beginning to tire of the lack of food and other basics. As the journal begins, Cassandra's sister, Rose, half-jokingly invokes a spell to change their fortunes. Shortly afterward a series of events dramatically changes their lives. As in all good stories, there are ups and downs, disappointments and failures, along with the happy incidents. And as we know it will, the story ends on an optimistic note. The book, first published in 1948, was made into a play in 1954 and a movie in July 2003. This is the first novel of the author, born in 1896. She was one of the most successful female dramatists of her time. She is also author of 101 Dalmatians. I read this book last year and liked so much that I was happy to read every word again before I wrote this review. 2003 (orig. 1948).
Janet Crane Barley - Children's Literature
Discussion Questions
1. I Capture the Castle was first published in 1948. How might readers have responded differently to the novel at that time? How might their responses have been the same? Why does the novel continue to appeal to readers today as it did in 1948?
2. I Capture the Castle is told through Cassandra's entries in her journals, an exercise she has undertaken in order to teach herself how to write. Why do you think Dodie Smith chose the form of the diary to tell the story of Cassandra and the Mortmain family?
3. Mortmain's celebrated novel is described throughout I Capture the Castle as a literary breakthrough, a predecessor to James Joyce's work, and meriting the analysis of famous literary critics. Yet beyond a few spare descriptions, Smith tells us little about the actual story. What do you imagine Jacob Wrestling to be about?
4. A voracious reader, Cassandra compares her situation to that of the Bennets in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. How would you compare the situation of the Mortmain sisters to that of the Bennet sisters?
5. Why does Mortmain encourage Cassandra to be "brisk" with Stephen? What does I Capture the Castle say about class in mid-twentieth-century England?
6. What is the meaning of the book's title?
7. Cassandra is fascinated by the Cottons and their American mannerisms, traditions and expressions, just as the Cottons are fascinated by the Mortmains and their English mannerisms, traditions and expressions. What does I Capture the Castle say about English preconceptions of Americans and America and vice versa?
8. How does I Capture the Castle reflect society's changing views toward women during the first half of the century? How do the women in the novel view the roles and opportunities open to them both in the family and in the world at large differently? Consider Cassandra, Rose, Topaz, Mrs. Cotton, and Mrs. Fox-Cotton.
9. Over the course of the novel, Cassandra comes to seem less a child "with a little green hand" and more a young woman. How is I Capture the Castle a story of Cassandra's coming of age?
(Questions issued by publishers.)