She still loved the theater, however, and in 1929 she wrote and sold a very successful play, Autumn Crocus. But at five feet tall, she was 'too short and not attractive enough,' in her own words, so she gave up acting and took a job at Heal's in London, where she became the store's toy buyer. But with the book's 1998 reissue, and the 2003 release of a film version from BBC Films, modern readers are rediscovering Dodie Smith.Īs a young woman, Smith's first ambition was to be an actress, and she enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Art (later the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) with hopes of going on the stage. Her other major work, the 1948 novel I Capture the Castle, was out of print here for many years (though it has always had a following in Britain).

Smith was once best known in the United States for her children's book The Hundred and One Dalmatians, which inspired an animated film from Disney-and, later, the live-action movie starring Glenn Close. As Barnes later told The Guardian, 'She said she didn't think I'd have much to do as her literary executor-in the last years of her life she was only earning around £12,000 from her books-but since her death her career has revived in a spectacular way.'

Education-Royal Academy of Dramatic Artīefore Dodie Smith died in 1990, she asked the novelist Julian Barnes to be her literary executor.

By the time she pens her final entry, she has 'captured the castle'-and the heart of the reader-in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love.

She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith