Dodie Smith
In 1948, Dodie Smith published I Capture the Castle, a novel that came several years after her stage work Dear Octopus, which had appeared in 1938. Born Dorothy Gladys Smith on 3 May 1896 in Whitefield, she was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and went on to work as a novelist, playwright, and children's writer, producing her books in English throughout her career.
Her children's fiction included two works centred on the same cast of characters. The Hundred and One Dalmatians appeared in 1956 and was later adapted by Disney as an animated film in 1961 and then again as a live-action film in 1996. Smith returned to the same material with The Starlight Barking, published in 1967.
Smith died on 24 November 1990 in Finchingfield and in Uttlesford. Across her career she had worked in several distinct forms — as a playwright with Dear Octopus, as a novelist with I Capture the Castle, and as a children's writer with The Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking. The two Disney adaptations of that 1956 book, released thirty-five years apart, mark a concrete point of reception for her work.
Quotes by Dodie Smith
Dodie Smith's insights on:
The family, that dear octopus from whos tentacles we never quite escape, not in our innermost hearts never quite wish to.
How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light! I can still recapture that first glimpse - see the sheer grey stone walls and towers against the pale yellow sky, the reflected castle stretching towards us on the brimming moat, the floating patches of emerald-green water-weed.
The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.
The Vicar isn’t High Church enough for confessions, and certainly most of me would have loathed to tell him or anybody else one word; but I did have a feeling that a person as wretched as I was ought to be able to get some sort of help from the Church. Then I told myself that as I never gave the Church a thought when I was feeling happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn’t. You can’t get insurance money without paying in premiums.
Perhaps he found beauty saddening – I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty’s evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die.
