Issue 12: Summer 2011

Novelist Harriet Evans recommends the book she turns to when, quite simply, she needs cheering up.

I Capture the Castle (1949) is my favourite book. I don’t say that lightly; like any bibliophile I have many contenders for the title, but this edges ahead for many reasons, not least because of its therapeutic qualities; I would also recommend it for writer’s block, and homesickness, but we’ll come on to that. It takes the form of a journal, written by the teenage Cassandra Mortmain, about her and her penniless family, living in a dilapidated Suffolk castle in the mid- 1930s. When the heir of nearby Scoatney Hall and his brother return from America to open up the house, Cassandra’s whole family benefits, in different ways.

I read this book when I need taking out of myself for a while. For me, no book has quite the magically engrossing qualities of I Capture the Castle. Christopher Isherwood wrote to Dodie Smith that it was ‘a book that will be very much lived in by many people; you can live in it, like Dickens’ . Cassandra grows up throughout the book, ‘capturing’ her family and their lives, becoming a fine writer in the process, and falling in love. It’s anything but cosy romance, though. Cassandra’s awakening sexuality and her feelings for the man she loves are visceral. The ending is one of the most unusual in all fiction, too. I’ve read it ten, fifteen times and each time can’t decide what will happen to her after the final page.

The story flows seemingly effortlessly: it’s charming, in all senses of the word. And yet, if you read Valerie Grove’s fantastic biography of Dodie Smith, Dear Dodie (1997), you see every line was agonised over, corrected and recorrected. You can hear Cassandra’s family – her ex-model stepmother Topaz, who likes to commune with nature, naked; her beautiful, selfish but still sympathetic sister Rose; and her difficult father, struggling with writer’s block (Cassandra’s cure for this is so dramatic it makes me scurry back to my desk in gratitude). I loathe it when people assume my novels are based on real life, as if I don’t have imagination enough to invent characters; I Capture the Castle is the only novel in which, even knowing they’re not real, I still can’tquite believe the characters don’t exist, somewhere.

The book is perfect for remembering England when it seems far away. I couldn’t put my finger on why it’s so nostalgic, without being sentimental, until I discovered that Smith wrote it in America during the war. Her soonto-be husband Alec Beesley was a conscientious objector and the couple left England in early 1939. There’s a sense of homesickness and guilt at being absent from the country she loves in its hour of need that contributes significantly to the shimmering, dream-like quality of the book. It loves England, in the way I love England: ‘oh, not flags and Kipling and outposts of Empire and such, but the country and London and houses like Scoatney. ’

There’s so much in I Capture the Castle that it expands to suit your mood, I’ve found. I’ve read it when I’m down in the depths of winter, and it offers the promise of spring; in the height of summer, when the greenery and beauty can be too much; when I’ve been desperately, foolishly in love, when I think I can’t write another line ever again; and every time it soothes me like cool water. It is so much more than a coming of age novel. It’s hopeful, funny, sharp, wise – and gripping, as every really good piece of bibliotherapy ultimately should be.