I Capture The Castle

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Oh, dear, there has just been a slight scene! Rose asked Topaz to go to London and earn some money. Topaz replied that she didn’t think it was worth while, because it costs so much to live there. It is true that she can never save more than will buy us a few presents—she is very generous.

Cassandra keeps a diary, and at first it is mostly meandering observations on how poor they are and how hard everything is. Then Stephen finds a job as a model and the American owners of the castle show up.

What to say, what to say? Hard to put down all the feelings. To put it simply: you did everything right. The characterization like flowers slowly blooming. The story like seasons changing, invisibly but inevitably. The romance made both heartfelt and utterly, often infuriatingly real. The details, oh the details! I was put right into this world and right into Cassandra's head. And the charm! You are such a charming book - so amusing and so sweet-tempered yet with a certain saltiness as well, and a sharp tang. Head in the clouds; feet firmly planted on earth. You are a love letter to the past and to writing and to what makes a home and to young people with all of their future ahead of them and older people who have all of their future ahead of them. You are a love letter to love! I fell in love with you in turn. I would change nothing about you. I Capture the Castle is the first novel of English author Dodie Smith, written during the Second World War when she and her husband Alec Beesley, an English conscientious objector, moved to California. She longed for home and wrote of a happier time, unspecified in the novel apart from a reference to living in the 1930s. Smith was already an established playwright and later became famous for writing the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Every time I meet someone who also loves I Capture the Castle,” writes Jenny Han in her foreword to the new edition of Dodie Smith’s 1948 classic, “I know we must be kindred spirits.” The first half of this was like Jane Austen herself descended from the heavens (godlike) and delivered me, personally, a gift. They have strong opinions about whether Cassandra and Simon Cotton ought to be together (they should not, Simon does not deserve Cassandra) and whether the 2003 movie adaptation was any good (it was not, young Henry Cavill was inspired casting for Stephen but everything else was nonsense). They have read I Capture the Castle and fallen under its immensely charming and slightly melancholy spell, and they know that everyone else who loves that book must be a kindred spirit.

Now she is sitting on the steel trivet, raking the fire. The pink light makes her look more ordinary, but very pretty. She is twenty-nine and had two husbands before father (she will never tell us very much about them), but she still looks extraordinarily young. Perhaps that is because her expression is so blank. He is still a splendid-looking man, though his fine features are getting a bit lost in fat and his colouring is fading. It used to be as bright as Rose’s.

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? Perhaps part of the reason I resisted this book is that I came to it thinking it would be romance (because of the movie poster cover of the book, which says something like, "A well-loved classic that has become the most romantic movie of the year" - hate those movie poster covers), but it is actually, more than anything, a coming of age story. I say this because I think that whether you prefer coming-of-age or romance, it helps to know what you're getting into when you start a book. In my experience, romantic novels solve the problems of life by bringing characters together in true love. I Capture the Castle is written through Cassandra's eyes, so it does not rely on romantic satisfaction to tell the story, as, perhaps, it would have if it were told by another character in the same book. Rather, like any good coming of age story, develops through revelations of the unreliability of people around Cassandra and her discovery her own independence and capabilities.

We both prayed hard, Rose the much longest — she was still on her knees when I had settled down ready to sleep. “That’ll do, Rose,” I said at last. “It’s enough just to mention things, you know. Long prayers are like nagging.” Young Adult Fiction. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra begins a journal in an attempt to perfectly capture her family and the run-down castle they live in. This book wasn't at all what I expected. I'm reading it for the first time as an adult, and maybe I would have felt differently about it as a kid, but now I just found it sort of upsetting, and not in a cathartic way. I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel—I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now my stories have been very stiff and self-conscious. The only time father obliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.

The arrival of wealthy American family, the Cottons, who move into nearby Scoatney Hall, thus becoming landlords to Cassandra and her family, brings about much excitement for the Mortmain’s. And so we witness a young girl’s coming of age as she falls in love for the first time and encounters various rites of passage with both sharp wit and a level head.