I Capture the Castle is Dodie Smith's first novel, written in 1949 while living in USA. Smith was already an established playwright and later became famous for authoring the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians. This coming-of-age novel recounts in the first person the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in a decaying English castle during the 1930s. The narrator is Cassandra Mortmain, an intelligent 17 year old who tells the story via her personal diaries.The head of the Mortmain family is Cassandra Mortmain's father, a writer suffering from writer's block who has not published anything since his first book, a hit entitled, Jacob Wresstling. Ten years before the story begins, he took out a forty-year lease on a dilapidated but beautiful castle, hoping to find either inspiration or isolation there; now, his family is selling off the furniture to buy food. Mortmain's second wife, Topaz, is an exotically beautiful artist's model...