The impoverished family of the protagonists have signed a long-term lease for the titular castle, a bona fide one with a real moat and “a high, round tower …on a little hill.” As the characters travel back and forth to the village, the tone almost reads like an Agatha Christie novel without a single dead body - the only casualties being the young hearts that break all over the place. This is the kind of eccentric touch that permeates I Capture the Castle. They use a dressmaker’s dummy, whose voice they animate in turn, to talk to each other most candidly. And in fact, its heroines, diarist narrator Cassandra Mortmain and her sister Rose, are self-described “Austen-Brontë girls” who argue about which beloved author is best while talking to each other late at night. The novel pays obvious homage to many a literary source, reading like a classic Austen classic marriage plot mixed with the tangled and unrequited passions of a gentler Emily Brontë. Author Dodie Smith is perhaps known best for kid-classic 101 Dalmatians, but this her most-loved work, and the new edition has a blurb from JK Rowling right on the cover.

I Capture the Castle, which was a bestseller in the 1950s and was recently re-issued thanks to its passionate fanbase, is something of a cult classic. A few weeks ago, that rainy day arrived and I opened the copy I’d bought at a small used bookstore on Cape Cod. Yet it’s harder to find books that are genuinely delightful - honest without being grim, funny without being shallow, romantic without being syrupy.įor a long time, I’d avoided reading Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle because it was rumored to be one such book, and I wanted to save it for a rainy day. It’s easy in these days of plentiful bookstores and e-readers to come upon novels that are good, in the sense that they’re smart, bracing, accomplished, and maybe even innovative.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith