Not long ago my wife was looking desperately for reading material and I dug up I Capture the Castle and suggested it to her.

Of course, shortly thereafter it was reprinted in trade paperback - I think more in reaction to the new live action version of The Hundred and One Dalmatians than anything. I picked up a copy of I Capture the Castle real cheap at a used book sale, feeling pretty proud of myself for having found a not very available book. There was a sequel to The Hundred and One Dalmatians called The Starlight Barking - a terrible book. I Capture the Castle appeared in 1948, The Hundred and One Dalmatians a bit later. She moved to the US at the outbreak of war because her husband was a pacifist. It turns out Smith was a quite prolific and apparently rather popular playwright in England in the 30s. (Though at least the first Disney version, the animated one, is really a pretty darn good film.) I had no idea she had written anything else. I had at the time read The Hundred and One Dalmatians, Dodie Smith's most famous story - and altogether a slier and smarter story than the Disney version. I first heard of I Capture the Castle several years ago, and immediately formed the idea I might like it. (And perhaps I am merely reflecting my experience.) Here's what I wrote about I Capture the Castle around the time the movie based on it appeared, in 2003. Even I Capture the Castle was for a long time, it seems to me, eclipsed by The Hundred and One Dalmatians, but sometime in the last few decades it was enthusiastically rediscovered - or re-emphasized. Her other novels and her plays seem mostly forgotten nowadays, as I note, but they must have been fairly successful, in that several of them were filmed. But she wrote several other novels, about a dozen plays, and four volumes of autobiography. She is one of those writers known nowadays for only a small subset of her oeuvre - two books, the children's novel T he Hundred and One Dalmatians, and the adult novel I Capture the Castle. Dodie Smith was born May 3, 1896, and she died aged 94 in 1990.

I capture the castle pages