Jen is here this week with a book written by the author of the much better known “One Hundred and One Dalmations.” Dodie Smith’s “I Capture the Castle” is sometimes compared to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and yet is something altogether different but equally—if not more—enjoyable.
Nothing like a good book to cheer one up. This is like a grown-up version of Mandy (Julie Andrews) and The Secret Garden (Francis Hodgson Burnett). I adore those two books, so what a treat to find this. Originally published in the late 40s, it was hard to come by for a while. Thanks to the book fairies, it was reissued.
The heroine is a teenage girl living in a castle in England in the 30s. Cassandra Mortmain (fun to look for hidden meanings in that name!*) is remarkably even-keeled and cleverly perceptive despite being between a rock and a hard place.Her mother is dead, her step-mother is not much older than Cassandra’s sister, her father is a famously screwy novelist and they have no money. No money. They don’t have food, heat, much clothing or any intention of paying their rent on the castle.
But it is not depressing. Like a fairy tale there is a plethora of hopefulness. I never worried that anything really awful would happen because Cassandra doesn’t. She has that glowing, occasionally dramatic teenage stamina that never questions the power of love and magic.
Love and magic abound. The castle itself is a mix of hundreds of years of additions—towers and moats and druid mounds. Cassandra is in love with it all. Years of poverty have stripped the family of its possessions and the castle of its furnishings, but we still feel Cassandra’s love of it all.
As she comes of age and searches inside herself we are lucky to be privy to her musings. She describes herself as, “a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.” How clever.
She pines for love and for security. She wants to find true love and happiness for herself and those around her, but she will do nothing at the expense of something else. No bit of goods is worth the sacrifice of one’s true self.
What I like best is that she ultimately gets everything she wants but realizes that the wanting is often better. She is a better person for having wanted and struggled and she knows that the joys in life are from the journey as much as from the arrival.*Cassandra: in Greek Mythology she was a princess of Troy who was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo. When she spurned him he cursed her. She would be an unbelieved seer.
Mortmain: (Fr. dead hand). Also a legal term regarding ownership in perpetuity of real estate. So, Cassandra, the only one who truly sees the castle around her, will own it in her heart forever. Cool, huh?
Mortmain: (Fr. dead hand). Also a legal term regarding ownership in perpetuity of real estate. So, Cassandra, the only one who truly sees the castle around her, will own it in her heart forever. Cool, huh?
Jennifer Petty Mann grew up in New York City, moved to London, England, then back to Boston, and is now happily ensconced on the EightMile river in Lyme with her three little ones. A former teacher, window dresser for Saks, and designer, she is taking her love of books to the proverbial “street.”