I Capture the Castle

I Capture the Castle is Dodie Smith's first novel, and was published in 1948. Smith, who wrote the novel during a sojourn in America, was already an established playwright and later became famous for authoring the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians. I Capture the Castle relates the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in a decaying English castle in the 1930s. The story is told by Cassandra Mortmain,... more

I Capture the Castle is Dodie Smith's first novel, and was published in 1948. Smith, who wrote the novel during a sojourn in America, was already an established playwright and later became famous for authoring the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians. I Capture the Castle relates the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in a decaying English castle in the 1930s. The story is told by Cassandra Mortmain, a bright teenager, through her personal journal. A play based on the book appeared in 1954, and Heidi Thomas wrote a screen adaptation, which was filmed by Tim Fywell in 2003. The Mortmain family is very poor, but very interesting. Cassandra's father is a writer suffering from writer's block who has not published anything since his first book, Jacob Wrestling (a reference to Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), which was a hit. Ten years before the story begins, he took out a forty-year lease on a dilapidated but beautiful castle, hoping to find... less