Question 1

Who is Cassandra Mortmain, and what makes her such a beloved narrator?

Accepted Answer

Cassandra Mortmain is one of the most winning narrators in twentieth-century English fiction: seventeen years old, highly intelligent, observant, honest about her own feelings and confused about them in equal measure, and possessed of a prose style that is somehow simultaneously naïve and sophisticated. She begins the novel writing to practice her craft — 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink' is one of the most celebrated opening lines in English fiction — and continues because life in the castle keeps delivering events worth recording. What makes her beloved is the quality of her attention: she notices everything about the people she loves and describes it with a precision that is both affectionate and unsentimental. She is aware of her own youth and the ways it limits her understanding, and this self-awareness gives her narration a reliability that few first-person narrators in novels of this kind possess; the reader trusts her, which makes her romantic confusions and her eventual recognition of her own feelings all the more moving.

Question 2

What is the castle in I Capture the Castle?

Accepted Answer

Belmotte Castle — the Mortmain family home — is a ruined medieval castle in Suffolk that Cassandra's father James Mortmain, a once-famous novelist, has converted into a habitable dwelling of sorts: a gatehouse that provides the main living quarters, with the great hall used for storage and the central tower increasingly uninhabitable. The Mortmains are impoverished — Mortmain's one famous novel, Jacob Wrestling, was published twelve years before the novel begins, and he has been unable to write since — and the castle represents both the romance of their bohemian existence (unconventional, beautiful, uncomfortable) and its practical disaster (no money, no heat, no prospects). The castle is also a period piece: a ruin from a more ordered past that the present cannot quite sustain, which fits the novel's preoccupation with the relationship between the romantic ideals that the Mortmains embody and the practical world that keeps intruding on those ideals.

Question 3

When did Dodie Smith write I Capture the Castle?

Accepted Answer

Dodie Smith wrote I Capture the Castle during the Second World War, while she and her husband Alec Macbeth Beesley — who was a conscientious objector — were living in the United States having left England in 1939 before the outbreak of war. The novel is set in the 1930s and was published in 1948; it was written in California and Pennsylvania during the war years, with Smith working from memory and imagination to reconstruct an England she was not in and was homesick for. This context gives the novel a particular character: it is a wartime evocation of a prewar England, written from exile, which partly accounts for the quality of longing and nostalgia that suffuses it even though the events it describes are entirely ordinary. Smith later returned to England after the war; she is best known internationally for The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), but I Capture the Castle has consistently been her most critically admired work.

I Capture the Castle Reading Order

Complete I Capture the Castle Book List