I Capture The Castle

I Capture the Castle is the first novel by English author Dodie Smith, written in the 1940s when she and her husband (also British and a conscientious objector) lived in California during WWII. She longed for England and wrote of a happier time— unspecified in the novel but probably early 1930s— between the wars. Smith was already an established playwright and later became famous for writing the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

The novel relates the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in genteel poverty in a decaying English castle during the 1930s. The first person narrator is Cassandra Mortmain, an intelligent teenager who tells the story via her personal journal. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 82 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.