"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." So begins seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, the narrator of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. You've got to admit that's an interesting opening line. Only eight words and you know something unusual must be going on because who sits in a sink to write?
Well, Cassandra does and she has a good reason to since that position catches the last of the daylight. The Mortmain family doesn't have electricity. They're a 1930's family living in a medieval castle and they use lamps and candles after sunset. If they sound romantic and eccentric, I Capture the Castle suggests that normalcy may be something only people with an income can afford. The Mortmains might still be eccentric under regular circumstances but right now they're too poor to be normal.
Once Mr. Mortmain wrote a successful book and their income was such that eccentricity was more acceptable but that was before his leviathan-sized writer's block moved in. Since then the family has been making do on his ever-decreasing royalties, the money his second wife brings in from artist modeling jobs and what the family gets from selling the castle's furnishings. (Not really their property). It is obvious to Cassandra and her elder sister, Rose, that they must shore up the family income. So they decide Cassandra will teach herself to write novels and Rose must marry a rich husband.
If that sounds a trifle Jane Austenish, well it should; the alternatives for a grown woman to earn an lving in England had improved some between the early 1800's and 1900's but in both eras most women made their futures through marriage. Rose's wish for a suitable suitor is granted but there is where the troubles really begin.
Dodie Smith talks about the relative meanings of wealth in this book as well as distractions, creativity and, of course, the question of love. She does it all through the original voice of Cassandra Mortmain, that precocious child with breezy descriptive powers and acute insight into people. Through Cassandra we see the characters of ICTC move into realized dimensions: the father, embittered by years of frustration and despair; the bohemian stepmother whose care for a husband, a family and herself is creating a wall of exhaustion; the love-lorn stable boy is there, as well at the desperate girls and then the set of brothers who may make or ruin the fortunes of this family. None of them are good or evil, just caught in circumstances beyond their control.
The book is loaded with as much charm as you should expect from the woman who created A Hundred and One Dalmatians but don't expect any split-haired villainess or talking family of pets to take over the scene. There are the Mortmains, the people they care about and an English summer. That is all the charm any reader needs.
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