Dodie Smith

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Abridged Edition

Penguin Readers Level 4: I Capture the Castle (ELT Graded Reader)

I Capture the Castle

Stop What You’re Doing and Read…To Your Daughter: I Capture the Castle & The Secret Garden

A beautiful coming-of-age novel about first love

There are many good reasons to read Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle: it provides excellent advice about dressing on a budget (dye all your clothes sea-green); how to cope when the man you love falls for your elder sister (keep a diary) and your stepmother dances naked in the rain (ditto). Given that most teenagers believe their parents to be mad - and vice versa - the novel also serves as a helpful guide to recognising the fine line between eccentricity and outright insanity

A book for anyone who is young, poor, fed up and yearning for something exciting to happen

When I read I Capture the Castle it immediately became one of my favourite novels of all time, and I was very annoyed that nobody had told me about it before

Unputdownable and loved by teenagers and adults everywhere.

Everyone I've passed it on to has found it a hit - it works every time, for absolutely everybody

So what makes these different to any other set of classics? In a moment of inspiration Random House had the bright idea of actually asking Key stage 2 children what extra ingredients they could add to make children want to read. And does it work? Well, put it this way...my 13-year-old daughter announced that she had to read a book over the summer holiday and, without any prompting, spotted The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas...and proceeded to read it! Now, if you knew my 13-year-old daughter, you would realise that this is quite remarkable. She reads texts, blogs and tags by the thousand - but this is the first book she has read since going to high school, so all hail Vintage Classics!

National Association for the Teaching of English

A complete joy of an eccentric English coming-of-age novel

The perfect lockdown read - gentle and infused with a glowing warmth, featuring an emotional complexity that makes the simple story rewarding throughout

Cassandra Mortmain lives with her bohemian and impoverished family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. 
 
Her journal records her life with her beautiful, bored sister, Rose, her fading glamorous stepmother, Topaz, her little brother Thomas, and her eccentric novelist father who suffers from a financially crippling writer's block. 
 
However, all their lives are turned upside down when the American heirs to the castle arrive and Cassandra finds herself falling in love for the first time. 
 
'I know of few novels that inspire as much fierce lifelong affection in their readers' Joanna Trollope 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

A special edition of the coming-of-age classic

The universally adored story of Cassandra Mortmain, her mad family, her loves and her heartaches. A perfect novel.

Dodie Smith was born in Manchester in 1896. Aged 17 she set off for London, determined to become an actress, but she struggled to find work, living off baked beans in freezing hostels. While working at the famous Heals department store, Dodie turned to writing plays instead, and her first was an overnight sensation - the newspapers excitedly declared 'Shopgirl Turns Playwright!'. During the war she moved to Hollywood with her husband, and it was there, spurned on by regret and homesickness for the English countryside she'd left behind, that Dodie began writing I Capture the Castle. When a friend gave Dodie a dalmatian puppy (presented in a hat box!) this began a life-long love of the spotty dogs. Dodie's well-loved novel 101 Dalmatians was inspired by her experiences of raising fifteen puppies. She lived in a ramshackle cottage with her husband and many other animals until her death in 1990, aged 94.

I Capture the Castle

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