I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith

List Price: $13.95
Pages: 343
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312201656
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

The glorious return of one of the century’s most beloved novels! I Capture the Castle is as brightly witty and adventuresome today as it was when it was first published fifty years ago. Long unavailable in American stores, it has been lovingly passed down from generation to generation. Until its reissue, it enjoyed the rare privilege of being one of the most requested items of used bookdealers.

I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the old castle’s walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has “captured the castle”--and the heart of the reader--in one of literature’s most enchanting entertainments.

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1. I Capture the Castle was first published in 1948. How might readers have responded differently to the novel at that time? How might their responses have been the same? Why does the novel continue to appeal to readers today as it did in 1948?

2. I Capture the Castle is told through Cassandra’s entries in her journals, an exercise she has undertaken in order to teach herself how to write. Why do you think Dodie Smith chose the form of the diary to tell the story of Cassandra and the Mortmain family?

3. Mortmain’s celebrated novel is described throughout I Capture the Castle as a literary breakthrough, a predecessor to James Joyce’s work, and meriting the analysis of famous literary critics. Yet beyond a few spare descriptions, Smith tells us little about the actual story. What do you imagine Jacob Wrestling to be about?

4. A voracious reader, Cassandra compares her situation to that of the Bennets in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. How would you compare the situation of the Mortmain sisters to that of the Bennet sisters?

5. Why does Mortmain encourage Cassandra to be “brisk” with Stephen? What does I Capture the Castle say about class in mid-twentieth-century England?

6. What is the meaning of the book’s title?

7. 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?

8. How does I Capture the Castle reflect society’s changing views toward women during the first half of the century? How do the women in the novel view the roles and opportunities open to them both in the family and in the world at large differently? Consider Cassandra, Rose, Topaz, Mrs. Cotton, and Mrs. Fox-Cotton.

9. Over the course of the novel, Cassandra comes to seem less a child “with a little green hand” and more a young woman. How is I Capture the Castle a story of Cassandra’s coming of age?

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"You’ll love it, it has been one of my favorite novels. Cassandra Mortmain is one hell of a narrator, offering sharp wit, piercing insight and touching lyricism. She is a heroine we readers wish we could be, a young woman it is impossible not to adore. "

———Susan Isaacs

"To say that I couldn’t put it down is hardly original, but true…I think it is a book that will be much lived in by many people, because you can live inside it, like Dickens. "

———Christopher Isherwood

"Dreamy and funny...an odd, shimmering timelessness clings to its pages. A thousand and one cheers for its reissue. A+ "

———Entertainment Weekly

" It’s as fresh as if it were written this morning, and as classic as Jane Austen. I’m very happy to have met it. "

———Donald E. Westlake

"Much more fun than the reader has any right to expect "

———The Weekly Standard

"A delicious, compulsively readable novel about young love and its vicissitudes. What fun! "

———Erica Jong

"It is an occasion worth celebrating when a sparkling novel, a work of wit, irony and feeling, is brought back into print after an absence of many years. So uncork the champagne for I Capture the Castle. "

———The Los Angeles Times