I Capture the Castle

Who can resist a story that begins, “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. My feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cozy”? Especially when you know the author also wrote 101 Dalmations? 

I loved this coming-of-age story for the teenage narrator’s quirky, elegant writing. She’s an aspiring novelist, “capturing” the characters around her in her diary. She’s largely left to her own devices, along with her two siblings, on the grounds of a remote castle, with a bohemian stepmother and a… show more.

Granted, nobody would call a castle a small space, but the world of 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain—the narrator of this full-of-life novel-in-journal-form—is hemmed in by her father’s writer’s block and his innate dislike of neighbors, resulting in their family’s life of dwindling gentile poverty in a dilapidated rented castle.

Much of the novel’s long-lasting enchantment is how Cassandra makes the best of the stone walls that contain and border her life. Cassandra has a wonderful imagination and a knack for seeing her life as a story. A very funny and wise coming-of-age story about how our homes shape our world-views.

I found I Capture the Castle when I was sixteen, and fell deeply in love with the heroine, Cassandra Mortmain, on the first page.

Here was a girl who wrote in her journal about her weird family, while sitting with her feet in the kitchen sink in a crumbling castle. I was hooked.

It didn’t matter that she lived in rural England in the 1930s, she was Me! Quirky, funny, insecure, wondering, thoughtful, and a great observer. She helped me grow up. 

I’ve returned to the book over the decades, to re-read or listen to, and the familiarity of Cassandra’s… show more.

I credit this book for rekindling my love for fiction after years spent reading non-fiction art and marketing books. I couldn’t believe the hours I found to read when I didn’t think I had any! I Capture the Castle plunges us immediately into the thoughts of a most unusual teenage girl, Cassandra Mortmain, who lives in a decrepit castle with her generally loveable but dysfunctional family. The first-person narrative and the descriptions of artistic poverty brought to us through the eyes and pen of Cassandra herself are delightful. Although her own love story is not tied up neatly with a… show more.

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink,” so begins Dodie Smith’s beloved classic about 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, an aspiring writer, and her family and their attempts to make a life in a crumbling castle in Sussex, England, despite the fact that the family has fallen into dire poverty.

I fell in love with this book as a child—though it can be read and enjoyed by all ages—because I related deeply to each strange member of the off-kilter Mortmain clan and wanted their dreams to come true with the same zeal I wanted good things to happen to those I… show more.

I’ve only recently given up dreaming of living in a castle (I’d actually rather live in a warm, efficient modern house now!) but when I was in my early teens, when I first read this, I’d have loved to live in the tatty semi-ruined castle that narrator Cassandra Mortmain and her penniless family rent. The novel was published in 1949 and it has the gentle rural and romantic feel that one can associate with that period—just postwar, looking back to a more idyllic time, and yet realistic about relationships. There’s a languor about it, a savouring of each… show more.

If you can’t decide whether you’d rather live like a Jane Austen character or a Bronte character, but you don’t have the income for either, split the difference and join the bohemian Montmain family. Two bookish teenage sisters live in a crumbling castle with their once-famous author father, their whimsical nymph of a stepmother, their genius little brother, and a handsome boy conveniently living on the premises. The girls are ready to stop reading about love and start living it, and right on cue two eligible bachelors show up. This book exudes summer, the one time of year when living… show more.

If Frances Wray is a model of grit and doggedness, her exact opposites inhabit this 1930s novel. The Mortmains of Godesend Castle are hopeless. Stepmother Topaz does her best – dishing up meals like brussels sprouts and cold rice – but the castle is gradually emptying out as they are forced to sell their furniture, and they have so few towels that, on wash days, they have to shake themselves dry, like dogs. Every time I re-read this old favourite I want to shake them too: get a job, I mutter. Take in some extra washing, while you’re doing… show more.

Smith wrote this novel in the late 1940s when she was traveling in America and yearning for England and you can feel her homesickness shining through the story. Cassandra Mortmain, the novel’s young narrator, tells the story of her unconventional family in a series of journals, describing their home—a run-down castle in the English countryside—their chronic lack of money, and the intriguing American neighbors who eventually upend their lives. Humor and wistfulness blend together, as Cassandra and her sister, Rose, strive to preserve their family’s bizarre way of life and, at the same time, to escape from it. Though the… show more.