Why I Capture the Castle has gained a secret cult of book lovers

“Every time I meet someone who also loves I Capture the Castle,” writes Jenny Han in her foreword to the new edition of Dodie Smith’s 1948 classic, “I know we must be kindred spirits.”

I Capture the Castle is that kind of book. It’s not quite famous, even among Smith’s works (her most famous title would be 101 Dalmatians), but for a certain kind of reader — mostly women, mostly bookish — it is perfect. Once you read it, you fall in love with it, and from then on you’re part of a secret club, self-selecting and wildly enthusiastic.

It’s a club whose members daydream about dyeing all their clothes green, as the penniless Mortmain family does when they can’t afford to buy anything new, and drinking cherry brandy outside an English country village inn, the way 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain does with her sister and her sister’s two suitors.

They have strong opinions about whether Cassandra and Simon Cotton ought to be together (they should not, Simon does not deserve Cassandra) and whether the 2003 movie adaptation was any good (it was not, young Henry Cavill was inspired casting for Stephen but everything else was nonsense). They have read I Capture the Castle and fallen under its immensely charming and slightly melancholy spell, and they know that everyone else who loves that book must be a kindred spirit.

I Capture the Castle is a book about reading, and a book about the history of the English novel, and how different formations of the novel butt up against each other and fight, which is catnip to a certain kind of reader. But what makes it so compelling is the voice of its narrator: thoughtful, funny, and eminently lovable Cassandra.

I Capture the Castle is Cassandra’s diary. She’s an aspiring author, and she is setting out to capture in words the ruined castle where she lives with her family, in the middle of the English countryside in the 1930s. When the Mortmains moved into the castle, the plan was for it to be a romantic and bohemian home, maintained on the royalties earned by Cassandra’s novelist father, a high modernist James Joycean type — but he stopped writing years ago, the royalties from his first book dried up, and now the castle is dreary and crumbling.

Eggs for tea and cocoa made with real milk are a special treat, saved only for special occasions. All of the family’s nice furniture has been sold off, so that when they try to host a dinner party, they have to take the door off the hen coop, mount it on a trestle, and push it up to a window seat so their guests will have somewhere to eat. Their clothes are ragged and sad. Cassandra has not had a dressing gown for years; she uses the remains of her last one to wrap up the hot brick she puts in her bed to keep warm at night.

But Cassandra faces poverty the way she faces everything: with a clear-eyed and deadpan sense of humor that makes her extraordinarily likable. Tallying up her family’s earning potential, Cassandra rapidly dismisses herself, her father, and her stepmother before turning her attention to her older sister, Rose: “Now if anyone in this family is nil as an earner, it is Rose,” she explains matter-of-factly; “for though she plays the piano a bit and sings rather sweetly and is, of course, a lovely person, she has no real talents at all.” Luckily, Cassandra hastens to add, although the castle rent is 40 pounds a year, the landlord has never made them pay it, and in fact “always sent us a ham at Christmas whether we payed the rent or not. He died last November and we have sadly missed the ham.”

Cassandra and Rose think of themselves as two sisters from a 19th-century marriage plot book, “two Brontë-Jane Austen girls,” Cassandra writes, “poor but spirited, two girls of Godsend castle.” So as the book opens in March, and they learn that their new landlords are two rich and handsome young American brothers, they know exactly what that means for the kind of story they’re living in: It’s the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, and Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy have just come to town. As long as Rose, the family beauty, can arrange to fall in love with the richer one, their happy ending is assured.

Obligingly, Rose convinces herself that she is love with the eldest of the brothers, Simon, and sets about wooing him; eventually, he proposes and showers wealth down on the Mortmain family.

But the Mortmains aren’t really living in a marriage plot novel, as much as Cassandra likes to think that they are. They’re living in the intersection between a marriage plot novel and a modernist novel, and their story soon fractures in ways Cassandra doesn’t expect. Rose finds that she isn’t in love with Simon, Cassandra finds that she is, and their father’s long-dormant writing career begins to awaken and grow and develop in ways that Cassandra finds confusing and frightening, just as Rose’s love story begins to fall apart.

The great pleasure of I Capture the Castle is Cassandra’s voice, which remains candid and blunt even when she’s in the deepest throes of heartbreak. At one point her misery is so intense that “I wanted to fling myself down in the mud and beat my way into the ground,” but, she remarks, “I had just enough sense to know what I should look like after trying.” At her most miserable, “I found myself going round leaning against walls — I can’t think why misery makes me lean against walls, but it does.” Cassandra has a wry detachment from her own emotions that keeps them funny but also keeps the feeling running beneath the surface of the book like a stream: You laugh at her heartbreak, but you feel it deeply too.

If you are the kind of person who, like Rose and Cassandra, likes to debate whether you’d rather live in a world that was Jane Austen with a touch of Charlotte Brontë or Charlotte with a touch of Jane, I Capture the Castle will fill your heart with joy. Once you fall in love with it, you can reread it over and over. And you will know without a doubt that anyone you meet who loves I Capture the Castle too must be a kindred spirit.