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.” When he came out he was as nice a man as ever—nicer, because his temper was so much better. Apart from that, he didn’t seem to me to be changed at all. But Rose remembers that he had already begun to get unsociable—it was then that he took a forty years’ lease of the castle, which is an admirable place to be unsociable in. Once we were settled here he was supposed to begin a new book. But time went on without anything happening and at last we realized that he had given up even trying to write—for years now, he has refused to discuss the possibility. Most of his life is spent in the gatehouse room, which is icy cold in winter as there is no fireplace; he just huddles over an oil-stove. As far as we know, he does nothing but read detective novels from the village library. Miss Marcy, the librarian and schoolmistress, brings them to him. She admires him greatly and says “the iron has entered into his soul.” 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.” The first part of the novel is written in a sixpenny notebook with a pencil stub. It progresses to a shilling notebook and finally to a two-guinea one, written with a pen. We started with a precocious teenager in March, at the beginning of spring: we leave the story with her standing on the threshold of womanhood as the autumn leaves start falling. I Capture the Castle is that kind of book. It’s not quite famous, even among Smith’s works (her most famous title would be 101 Dalmati a ns), but for a certain kind of reader — mostly women, mostly bookish — it is perfect. Once you read it, you fall in love with it, and from then on you’re part of a secret club, self-selecting and wildly enthusiastic.

I wish I knew of a way to make words flow out of father. Years and years ago, he wrote a very unusual book called Jacob Wrestling, a mixture of fiction, philosophy and poetry. It had a great success, particularly in America, where he made a lot of money by lecturing on it, and he seemed likely to become a very important writer indeed. But he stopped writing. Mother believed this was due to something that happened when I was about five. Every time I meet someone who also loves I Capture the Castle, I know we must be kindred spirits' - Jenny Han, bestselling author of To All the Boys I've Loved Before Very conversational and meandering. The main character grated quite a bit on me, with the continuous “I want something badly, but it never is going to happen” and “Oh, it happened, but I didn’t end up taking the opportunity because I like drama/I just don’t know” vibe. Rose, his elder daughter, is lovely and self-centred, and is willing to sell herself to get out of her poverty; the younger daughter Cassandra is pretty, witty and intelligent and aspires to be a novelist. Their youngest sibling Thomas is fifteen and precocious like Cassandra. Their stepmother (the girls’ mother had died eight years before the story opens), who is only twety-nine and goes by the unusual name Topaz is a former artists’ model who worships the ground James treads on and sometimes communes with nature by dancing on the moors stark naked. Stephen Colly, the Mortmains’ maid’s son who has continued to stay with them even after her mother’s passing, makes himself useful about the house and is hopelessly in love with Cassandra.Cassandra and Rose think of themselves as two sisters from a 19th-century marriage plot book, “two Brontë-Jane Austen girls,” Cassandra writes, “poor but spirited, two girls of Godsend castle.” So as the book opens in March, and they learn that their new landlords are two rich and handsome young American brothers, they know exactly what that means for the kind of story they’re living in: It’s the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, and Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy have just come to town. As long as Rose, the family beauty, can arrange to fall in love with the richer one, their happy ending is assured.

The summary is accurate and pointless. It is about Cassandra writing about herself in a journal. Their family is penniless. They do live in a castle. She is, as it promises, deeply, hopelessly in love. cassandra's father. a supposed genius but in reality a sexist, abusive, loathsome, distant fellow. he appears sporadically to ignore his children, leave his wife lonely, make everyone question his sanity and demand his supper from the ladies of the house. the frustrating part of this character is that his terrible behavior is overlooked and often glorified when he should be taken to task. i spent a good part of this book longing for someone to throw him into the moat.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. The cover is gorgeous. It looks pretty good in my bookcase, but after reading it, I'm not sure whether it still has a place there. The descriptions of the countryside are quaint, and I liked the atmosphere created by Smith in regards to the castle. I felt like I was really walking around it, breathing in it's ancient scent. What can I say about this book, other than it’s delightful and wonderful and perfect, and needs to be read if it not a thing you have already read (and, frankly, if it is a thing you have already read, needs to be read again, and read often).

Cassandra has many wonderful insights on life, on topics ranging from writing to faith to matters of the heart. I personally have had some of the same thoughts as Cassandra, except Ms. Smith was able to put them into words. Gioia, Michael (24 January 2013). "Pace University Will Offer Free Concert Readings of Drew Gasparini and Alex Brightman's Make Me Bad Musical". Playbill . Retrieved 2 October 2021. I noted in a recent book that I recently read, “Guard Your Daughters” by Diana Tutton, that some reviewers likened it to this book. That is what got me searching for this book and reading it. 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. But the Mortmains aren’t really living in a marriage plot novel, as much as Cassandra likes to think that they are. They’re living in the intersection between a marriage plot novel and a modernist novel, and their story soon fractures in ways Cassandra doesn’t expect. Rose finds that she isn’t in love with Simon, Cassandra finds that she is, and their father’s long-dormant writing career begins to awaken and grow and develop in ways that Cassandra finds confusing and frightening, just as Rose’s love story begins to fall apart.This is not even my sometimes-bias against romance showing. (Except okay maybe it is a little bit.) But in this book we go from a quirky ragtag family living in a dilapidated CASTLE in the English COUNTRYSIDE to...unrequited love. And sisterly hate. And family separation. And heartbreak and betrayal and sorrow and a whole lot of other things. 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. The kitchen looks very beautiful now. The firelight glows steadily through the bars and through the round hole in the top of the range where the lid has been left off. It turns the whitewashed walls rosy; even the dark beams in the roof are a dusky gold. The highest beam is over thirty feet from the ground. Rose and Topaz are two tiny figures in a great glowing cave.

The originators among writers--perhaps, in a sense, the only true creators--dip deep and bring up one perfect work; complete, not a link in a chain." Obligingly, Rose convinces herself that she is love with the eldest of the brothers, Simon, and sets about wooing him; eventually, he proposes and showers wealth down on the Mortmain family.

Romola Garai (Cassandra Mortmain) and Henry Thomas (Simon Cotton) in I Capture the Castle. Photograph: Allstar/BBC