Title: I Capture the Castle
Author: Dodie Smith
Publication date: 1948
Length: 351 pages
Rating:

Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain and her family may live in a ramshackle old English castle, but that’s about as romantic as her life gets. While her beautiful older sister, Rose, longs to live in a Jane Austen novel, Cassandra knows that meeting an eligible man to marry isn’t in either of their futures when their home is crumbling and they have to sell their furniture for food. So Cassandra instead strives to hone her writing skills in her journals. Until one day when their new landlords move in, which include two (very handsome) sons, and the lives of the Mortmain sisters change forever.

I Capture the Castle has been on my to-read list for years — I actually own two different editions! — and yet it’s taken me until now, thanks to the most recent Classics Club Spin, for me to finally read it. I’m so glad that I did!

In I Capture the Castle, we spend six months in the life of Cassandra Mortmain, a 17-year-old girl whose family has seen better days. Her father was once a brilliant, esteemed author — but it’s been many, many years since the publication of his one book, and he hasn’t written a word since. In the heyday of his success, the family — father, mother, Cassandra, older sister Rose and younger brother Thomas — moving into an old, crumbling castle, with visions of a charmed, quirky, lovely life ahead of them. Between the father’s brief prison stint (over what was apparently a misunderstanding involving a cake knife) and the mother’s death, the family’s well-being entered a downward spiral. Even the introduction of a glamorous young stepmother — Topaz, a beautiful woman who’d been a famous artists’ model — can’t dispel the gloom that hangs over their lives.

With barely any money coming in any longer from the father’s book — and his utter lack of interest in his family’s daily lives — they exist on meager food in a house where anything of value, including furniture, curtains, and clothing, has long been sold off. When the landlord from whom they have a 40-year lease on the castle dies and his American heirs show up, a new chapter opens for the Mortmain family. The heirs are a pair of 20-something-year-old brothers, who immediately take an interest in the eccentric family they discover living in the castle.

Cassandra’s sister Rose sees an opportunity to escape into an advantageous marriage… never mind whether she’s actually in love or not. Meanwhile, Cassandra devotes her time to writing — I Capture the Castle is her chronicle of her family’s experiences that year — while also coming to a clearer understanding of herself, her hopes and fears, and her place in the world.

I Capture the Castle is a lovely, quirky coming-of-age story. Set in the 1930s, Cassandra is not quite so naive as we might expect from this sort of tale. She learns about love and romance, marrying for money, loyalty and purpose, and so much more. The story doesn’t go exactly where I thought it was headed, and I was charmed throughout by all the ups and downs of Cassandra’s cleverness and imagination.

I was put in mind of Anne Shirley at times, such as Cassandra’s exclamation:

“Oh, it is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to!”

… or …

It is rather exciting to write by moonlight.

Cassandra’s imagination leads her to some truly inspired ideas and ways of looking at the world — but she is more world-weary than Anne Shirley and has seen bleak times over recent years. While the initial descriptions of her family’s circumstances have a touch of whimsy, we soon learn through Cassandra’s journals that their situation is quite dire, despite the good humor that serves as a front for hunger and going without.

She’s also rather sharp-eyed when it comes to the people she encounters, even as her coming-of-age journey brings her new understandings of relationships, motivations, and her own inner life. As one person in her circle observes:

Ah, but you’re the insidious type–Jane Eyre with of touch of Becky Sharp. A thoroughly dangerous girl.

(I wouldn’t call Cassandra dangerous… but she does go off in unexpected ways, and carries out some rash plans that are a bit batty… including locking someone in the castle tower, although it all works out well in the end.)

One of the truly excellent aspects of I Capture the Castle is the sharp character depictions. Cassandra herself is wonderful, but so are so many of the supporting characters, including Topaz, the Vicar, and the handsome young farmhand who seems fated for a career on the screen. They’re all vivid and memorable, and I’d love to spend more time with any one of them.

I truly enjoyed I Capture the Castle. It feels like a book I’ll need to read again. The first time through, I read it for the plot, eager to see what becomes of the characters and their occasionally ridiculous or complicated situations. I imagine that a second reading would let me focus more on Cassandra’s inner life, her flights of fancy, and the unique way she views the world around her.

I’m considering trying to track down the 2003 movie version of I Capture the Castle. Has anyone seen it?

Meanwhile, I’m very pleased to finally have read this book! I must say, I’ve had quite a good streak with my Classics Club Spin books. Not a bad one in the bunch! I’m already looking forward to whatever the next spin brings me.

About the author:

Dorothy Gladys “Dodie” Smith, born in 1896 in Lancashire, England, was one of the most successful female dramatists of her generation. She wrote Autumn, Crocus, and Dear Octopus, among other plays. I Capture the Castle, her first novel, was written in the 1940s while she was living in America. An immediate success, it marked her crossover from playwright to novelist, and was produced as a play in 1954. Smith also wrote the novels The Town in Bloom, It Ends with Revelations, A Tale of Two Families, and The Girl in the Candle-Lit Bath, but she is best known today as the author of two highly popular stories for young readers: The Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking. She died in 1990.