I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith
Summary
Seventeen year old Cassandra Mortmain writes her family's story into a series of journals from inside the crumbling, half furnished English castle they rent but can barely afford to heat, her father James a once celebrated experimental novelist who has not published a word since his acclaimed debut, Jacob Wrestling, years earlier. The family survives by selling off furniture piece by piece until two wealthy young American brothers, Simon and Neil Cotton, lease the neighboring estate and change everything. Cassandra's older sister Rose, desperate to escape the family's genteel poverty by any respectable means, sets her sights on Simon and becomes engaged to him, even though neither of them is genuinely in love. As the engagement drags on, Cassandra finds herself unexpectedly and privately falling for Simon herself, and the two share a single kiss while Rose is away that neither speaks of afterward. Rose, meanwhile, has quietly fallen for the more straightforward younger brother Neil, and the two elope together, leaving Rose's engagement to Simon in ruins. The novel closes with Simon, newly single, offering to take Cassandra to America with him, an offer she refuses, uncertain whether what she feels for him has any future or whether she is only in love with the idea of being loved; he leaves, and her last words, squeezed into the margin of the journal, are I love you, written three times over.
Smith writes entirely in Cassandra's own voice, funny, self aware, and often quietly devastating about the family's poverty even while she jokes about it, and the diary format lets a reader watch her understanding of her own feelings change in real time rather than after the fact. It reads warmly and quickly, closer to a coming of age comedy than to romance for most of its length, and its famous opening line, I write this sitting in the kitchen sink, sets a tone of wit under hardship that the whole book keeps up.
Smith wrote the novel in the United States, where she and her husband had settled during the Second World War, drawing on homesickness for England to shape the castle's setting. She had already found fame as a playwright before turning to fiction with this book, her first novel, published when she was fifty two.
Historical Context & Significance
Smith was British, which placed I Capture the Castle outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction regardless of its 1948 publication. The 1949 Pulitzer went to James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor, a novel of a wartime American air base that has not kept anything like the following Smith's novel eventually built.
The book found its widest audience only gradually, growing through readers' affection rather than critical campaigning, and it later placed eighty second on the BBC's 2003 Big Read survey of Britain's best loved novels and appeared on the broadcaster's 2019 list of the hundred most inspiring novels. Tim Fywell's 2003 film adaptation, and a 2015 BBC Radio 4 dramatization starring Holliday Grainger, introduced Cassandra's journals to generations of readers who never encountered the book any other way.