“Why have I been allowed so little pleasure out of my books?”

July 19, 2024 6:16 PM

In 1948, successful playwright Dodie Smith published I Capture the Castle, the coming-of-age story of a young woman written as a series of journal entries. Smith was influenced by Joyce and Proust and spent years meticulously editing the novel "with a care that would not have disgraced Flaubert," only to be devastated when it became a bestseller rather than a critical success. In the New York Review of Books, Anna Leszkiewicz makes the case for the novel's ambitious metatextual qualities: 'The Small-Girl's Proust' (archive.is).
posted by tofu_crouton (18 comments total)

I Capture the Castle is beloved and gets rediscovered all the time. It seems a little odd to focus on how she put so much effort into writing and revising--many writers do that, and ambition and effort aren't correlated with quality.

The Dodie Smith book that is underread is her sequel to The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Starlight Barking. It's science fiction, nothing to do with any of the Disney sequels, and I think it's best to go in without spoilers.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:55 PM on July 19 [19 favorites]

🤨
posted by HearHere at 7:16 PM on July 19

I just now remembered reading Hundred and One Dalmatians as a kid and loving it because of the twilight bark (well for other reasons too, but that's a big one) And to think I'd completely forgotten the name of the author. Thank you Dodie Smith. I think I have some reading to catch up on.
posted by evilDoug at 7:58 PM on July 19 [2 favorites]

I am the same age as Dodie Smith was when her first novel became a bestseller and I would be pretty fucking delighted if something I made became a best-seller and resulted in a $547k check. (that's the $42k mentioned in the first paragraph, adjusted for inflation since 1948.)

Hell, something I made a couple years back got me about $42k in 202x dollars and I was over the moon about that.
posted by egypturnash at 8:22 PM on July 19 [7 favorites]

It's science fiction, nothing to do with any of the Disney sequels, and I think it's best to go in without spoilers.

ooooooh Nellie!
posted by JHarris at 9:31 PM on July 19

I Capture The Castle is so good, and it has one of the best first lines in the history of literature.
posted by Gadarene at 11:29 PM on July 19 [4 favorites]

My wife and I read aloud I Capture the Castle and loved it so much we also did 101 Dalmations, which was fun. But we didn't go on to The Starlight Barking. Thanks for the recommendation, betweenthebars.
posted by straight at 11:49 PM on July 19 [1 favorite]

It makes me sad that Smith was so preoccupied with the opinions of the highbrow / lowbrow boys' club. If you read the article in the FPP, you'll come across the racist origins of "highbrow" and "lowbrow," and I'm not going to quote that here because it's too ugly.

As an autistic wordnerd in the late seventies and early eighties, I too was obsessed with What The Critics Would Say about the latest movies and books. So much of that writing came out of that "highbrow / middlebrow" mentality, which usually served as a nice respectable cloak for some very ugly racism and misogyny. Reading those reviews, in general, twisted my thinking, especially as a young woman. It literally hurt me, and it looks like it hurt Smith too.

And that mentality hasn't died: remember Jonathan Franzen's horror about his novel being chosen for Oprah's Book Club?

Arts criticism isn't quite that toxic now, for the most part, thank God. The change for the better is unfortunate for having arrived at a time where the type of criticism that appears in mainstream media isn't read that much anymore. And some of that criticism is pretty darn good, IMO. But at least today's youngsters aren't being gatekept, in terms of how they learn to assess art by themselves, by that particular culture of contempt.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 11:50 PM on July 19 [8 favorites]

The Punch magazine take on ‘middlebrow’ being for “people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like” makes me feel seen - and probably explains why I have an enduring love for “I Capture the Castle”well as a copy of Ulysses guiltily half read. I’m sorry Dodie Smith was disappointed by the nature of its success- but she did write one of the best books about adolescence.
posted by rongorongo at 12:43 AM on July 20 [3 favorites]

There was a period, before I’d read either, that I kept getting I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived in the Castle confused.

I mean, they’re both about young women growing up in a run-down house.
posted by davidwitteveen at 3:31 AM on July 20 [15 favorites]

Holy cow, I'm a professor of literature and had never heard of this, and, well, now Ms. Hobnail is a bit cross with me, because I clearly want to spend the day reading it instead of going to a long, boozy, loud lunch at a dog-friendly brewpub.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:40 AM on July 20 [9 favorites]

C. S. Lewis wrote about what highbrow might mean, testing the concept with various definitions to see whether they cover all the examples, a method that might be derived from Socrates. For example, does highbrow mean good? No, he trots out a work considered highbrow that isn't good.

Eventually, he finishes his argument with Dickens, who was a popular writer in his own time bet was later considered highbrow and concludes that highbrow means difficult.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:43 AM on July 20 [5 favorites]

There was a period, before I’d read either, that I kept getting I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived in the Castle confused.

Same. But mine persisted long after I'd read both. In fact, wanting to re-read I Capture the Castle a few years ago, I re-read We Have Always Lived in the Castle by mistake. (I realized my mistake very quickly, but stuck with it anyway.)
posted by Well I never at 8:02 AM on July 20 [3 favorites]

I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are two of my favorite books because apparently I only like books with "castle" in the title.
posted by edencosmic at 8:15 AM on July 20 [5 favorites]

I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are two of my favorite books because apparently I only like books with "castle" in the title.

What about The Blue Castle? Some people say that's their fave in the trilogy.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:42 AM on July 20 [8 favorites]

Oh I loved I Capture The Castle as a teenage girl writer. I think I still have it in my bookshelf though I haven't re-read it for years--sounds like it's time to dig it out! I'm saddened to know Smith struggled so much with the idea of acceptance in the literary world. On the other hand, as I am currently an author of urban fantasy books, I spent years dealing with similar feelings and figuring out that it was okay not to be "literary" in the fancy, artistic way everybody always wants you to. I wrote a short, personal essay that won an award in college and since then friends and family sometimes ask me why I don't "write like that" anymore. (Which in my anxiety brain means, "you know--dramatic, realistic stuff that wins prizes, instead of your silly faerie stories.") But stories serve different purposes for different people, and I still have to remind myself of that more than I'd like.

Her friend's remark (“He wanted to know why, if I had been clever enough to invent Mortmain’s work, I couldn’t have written his book instead of this one!”) makes me want to smash something but also makes me want to just laugh and laugh. Because that's not the book I wanted to write, my dude.

I am glad she wrote the book she did and I'm now excited to dive in again. And I think I need to get a new copy of Dalmatians too, AND The Starlight Barking which I hadn't heard of until today...my TBR list stretches to infinity but I shall never be bored.
posted by kittensyay at 10:32 AM on July 20 [5 favorites]

For those who really love I Capture the Castle, I think you would also enjoy the Montmaray novels by Michelle Cooper, starting with A Brief History of Montmaray. They are set before and during WWII but involve young women living in a rundown castle in a remote location -- and then get a bit more adventurous and have more to do with politics and gender issues. But they're really wonderful and I reread them with some frequency.
posted by suelac at 11:50 AM on July 20 [5 favorites]

> "I mean, they’re both about young women growing up in a run-down house."

And so is "The Glass Castle", for that matter.
posted by kyrademon at 4:52 PM on July 20