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language: English
country: UK
year: 1948
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: ca. 2010-9.2.11, 29.11.14-4.12.14, 13.6.20-17.6.20, 11.7.25-30.3.26
back in July I started reading Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle aloud to my husband; I figured he would enjoy it more than the last thing I read aloud to him (Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne lmao), and it had been a while since the last time I read it (back in 2020) and I was in the mood. it took eight months (of mostly fairly intermittent reading), but we finally made it to the last lines, the only-the-margin-left-to-write-on. I remain as delighted by it now as I was when I first read it in 2009.
I Capture the Castle is told through the journals of seventeen-turning-eighteen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, daughter of the famous English modernist writer James Mortmain, whose novel Jacob Wrestling was famous and groundbreaking but the royalties from which have dwindled over the years until — the inciting incident of the novel — they are, for the first time, nothing.
the Mortmains — James (just called “Mortmain”) and Cassandra are joined by Cassandra’s older sister Rose, younger brother Thomas, and eccentric stepmother Topaz, as well as Stephen Colley, the son of their former maid who continues to live with and do miscellaneous tasks for the Mortmains — live in the titular castle, a dilapidated late medieval structure with a number of early modern and Victorian additions, which they rent, though their rent is badly overdue, from a local minor titled gentry family, the sole remaining representative of which died a few months previously, leaving them in uncertain circumstances.
to their surprise, however, their late landlord’s unknown heirs suddenly arrive: two American brothers (children of estranged parents who are just getting to know each other again after their father’s death and who never expected to inherit an estate in England), Simon and Neil Cotton, who are young, handsome (if you can look past Simon’s beard), and, most importantly — to Rose, at least — rich. the plot is focused in large part on the relationships that develop between the Mortmains and the Cottons: Rose’s engagement to Simon, Cassandra’s hopeless and unexpected love for Simon, Stephen’s equally hopeless love for Cassandra, Simon’s intellectual interest in Mortmain and his work, Mrs. Cotton’s intellectual(?) interest in Mortmain, and so on. juxtaposed with this is Cassandra’s coming-of-age — in the middle of this period of emotional and familial turmoil — and the family’s hopes that Mortmain will, at long last, start writing again.
class is obviously a central concern of the novel: the Mortmains’, and especially Rose’s, anxiety about their class position is the driver of much of the plot. in some ways it’s quite conventional in its interest in the gentry — Smith makes no secret of the influence of Austen on the novel, with Cassandra comparing herself and her sister to Austen protagonists — or, at this point, the bourgeoisie and (in the Mortmains’ case) lapsed petty bourgeoisie. Stephen’s presence unsettles this to some extent, however: one of the most striking moments in the novel is a scene before the Cottons’ arrival where the family — less Mortmain himself — are attempting to budget with the local schoolteacher’s assistance. as she goes through their expenses, she asks about Stephen’s wages, forcing the Mortmains to admit that they don’t pay him and never have.
Stephen — who is in love with Cassandra — of course insists that he wouldn’t take their money (more specifically, that the room and board they provide him is enough), but this guilty admission floats in the background afterwards, particularly as Stephen, through the Cottons’ somewhat unpleasant English cousin Leda, who is a successful photographer, comes to have an income of his own. it doesn’t explicitly figure into Cassandra’s assessment of her feelings about Stephen, but it’s hard not to think that it factors into things: part of what is so appealing about Simon is precisely that he both is unfamiliar and, because he is rich, seems to promise her a new world of music and literature. Simon is, in other words, a class-appropriate object; Stephen is not. (to be clear: I don’t think the novel reinscribes these class anxieties so much as accurately portrays their effects. certainly the novel is very conscious that if Cassandra could fall in love with Stephen it would solve a lot of problems.)
the heart of the novel, though, is really Cassandra’s voice, which is both a well-executed portrait of a precocious teenager with literary aspirations, one who takes herself very seriously but has enough self-awareness to know when she’s being a bit melodramatic (even if she can’t stop herself), and also often very funny. some of the humor is out-of-character — Smith is just a funny writer herself (“I would approach matrimony as cheerfully as I would the tomb”) — but some of the humor is clearly, intentionally coming through Cassandra’s voice. in its earnestness, both serious and humorous, the book is deeply charming.
the cover copy on my edition (a movie tie-in, alas) describes the movie as “the most romantic movie of the year”, which is very goofy given the contents of both the book and the movie, but there’s an extent to which, if we capitalize the R, this is perhaps more accurate, insofar as another recurring aspect of the novel is its obvious affection for the English countryside, expressed in unabashedly Romantic terms, reaching back into the castle’s past, wallowing in its gothic present, and glorying in the landscape that surrounds it through the changing seasons. the emotional turning point of the novel takes place, of course, at Cassandra’s invented “pagan rites” on the old motte behind the later castle where the Mortmains live. but alongside the Romanticism is an obvious engagement with modernism: if Cassandra finds her father’s work challenging (and at times incomprehensible), Smith obviously thinks Mortmain’s modernism is a worthwhile endeavor — I wonder if there isn’t, perhaps, an autobiographical aspect to Cassandra’s frustration, if Smith didn’t wish she could write a book like one of Mortmain’s and produced I Capture the Castle out of resignation that she couldn’t. either way, the book’s Romanticism, while unabashed, is nonetheless self-conscious: it is aware of it as, on some level, a performance, even if the emotions it attempts to convey are sincerely felt (both by Cassandra and, I think, by Smith).
I’m going to stop here because I’ve lost whatever throughline I might have had. but I love this book (and [REDACTED] enjoyed it well enough). I still think it would be interesting to try to work out a Dracula Daily- or synchronousemma-type reading schedule to follow it over the course of the year it documents.
moods: emotional, funny, hopeful, reflective