I Capture the Castle - Tapa dura

The eccentric Mortmain family have been rattling around in a vast, decrepit castle for years, gradually slipping into financial ruin. Mortmain is crippled by writer's block, while his second wife Topaz - a fading beauty - struggles to be a dutiful stepmother to Rose, Cassandra and Thomas. Rose needs a husband, Thomas an education but Cassandra lives for her writing. Through her gloriously witty and shrewd diaries, she chronicles the trials of family life, the impact on their prospects of the arrival of a glamorous American family and the agonies of falling in love for the first time. Illustrated by Ruth Steed, with an Afterword by Anna South.

Dodie Smith was born in Lancashire in1896 and having first trained at RADA went on to carve out a career as both a novelist and a playwright, producing seven novels and ten plays. She wrote I Capture the Castle while living in America with her husband, and it was a great commercial and critical success when published in 1949. Some seven years later her children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians - inspired by her own beloved Dalmatian, Pongo - was published. It remains the work for which she is probably most well-known, in large part thanks to the iconic Walt Disney film based on it. Dodie Smith died in 1990.