Capturing Castles with Jane and Charlotte

At least my new cult has some distinguished members! J.K Rowling: “This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I’ve ever met.” Erica Jong: “A delicious, compulsively readable novel.”

The novel is I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith. It was recommended to me by one of my former students, who did not warn me she was luring me into a cult. (Tsk, tsk, Mallory.) You, Dear Reader, are hereby warned. Read at our own peril. (If you have already read the novel, then we can go off together and dye our clothes green while listening to Debussy or something like that.)

My glance round the internet reveals an unusual consensus. This is Smith’s best novel, but it is not even remotely her most well-known. She also wrote 101 Dalmatians, which thanks to a certain media conglomerate gets all the attention. Then again, I would guess that many people (like me) know the movie well, but never once wondered if there was a book back there somewhere behind the story of Pongo and Perdy.

There is a dog in I Capture the Castle, but that is totally irrelevant to the story. This is a story about people. At the outset of the story, we find the Mortmains living in a thoroughly decrepit English castle. They are supposed to be paying rent to live there, but fortunately their landlord never bothers to care that no rent is paid. The father is a famous novelist, whole sole novel is a sort of proto-Ulysses, an incomprehensible modernist tome beloved by people who like to pretend that they like that sort of thing. He wrote it a long time ago and never managed a second book. His second wife is a model. His two daughters and one son complete the family. And there is the nice, rather handsome lad who helps out with the chores. The book is the diary of the middle child, Cassandra.

Soon after the novel starts, the owner of the castle meets an untimely end and the new owners show up. They are…surprise, surprise…two young, wealthy, and quite eligible bachelors. Fill in the plot.

The key to the whole book shows up in the second diary entry. Cassandra is talking with her older sister, Rose, one evening.

“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel.” [said Rose]
I said I’d rather be in a Charlotte Bronte.
“Which would be nicest—Jane with a touch of Charlotte, or Charlotte with a touch of Jane?”
This is the kind of discussion I like very much but I wanted to get on with my journal, so I just said: “Fifty percent each way would be perfect,” and started to write determinedly.

If you read that passage and you thought, “I simply must read this book,” you will soon join us in the cult. If you read that passage and thought, What utterly maudlin rubbish,” well…

(By the way, the correct answer to Rose’s thought experiment is “Jane with zero Charlotte,” and while I would love to have that discussion with you right now, I must get on with this blog post.)

The book has charm, no doubt. But, there is also a tremendously interesting reflection on the love of Jane and Charlotte. The castle in the title is the decaying remnant of yesteryear in which Cassandra lives in the mid-20^th century. Looking around her home, the only sign that it is the 20^th century is that it would take a long time for a castle to reach this state of disrepair.

Living like that, you might assume that Cassandra would like to join the 20^th century, with one of those fancy new houses with things like indoor plumbing and electricity. Instead, Jane and Charlotte are her lodestars. Cassandra’s diary reads like something an Austen heroine would write. Two wealthy eligible bachelors show up. Cassandra is right there with you in writing the rest of the story. The title gives away the end of the story, but honestly was any other end possible? The castle is life in a Jane Austen novel. Cassandra captures the castle.

There really should be a name for the category of books that create worlds in which the readers desperately want to live. Austen, Bronte, and, of course, Rowling. Any others? I have never heard anyone sigh wistfully at how nice it would be to live in the worlds of Homer or Dickens or Dostoevsky or Faulkner.

The biggest wonder of I Capture the Castle is that I only recently learned of its existence. I cannot imagine that anyone who loves Austen or Bronte would fail to enjoy this book.