(cache)| Anna Leszkiewicz | The New York Review of Books Rediscovering Dodie Smith

One of the worst moments of Dodie Smith’s life was when her debut novel became a bestseller. It was 1948, she was fifty-two, and I Capture the Castle, her coming-of-age story told through the diary of a teenage girl, had just made the New York Times top ten fiction list. The American Literary Guild, which chose it as the November book of the month, ordered more than half a million copies and sent her a $42,000 check.

“Anyone reading through my press-cuttings book would believe the novel had had a great critical success and a great commercial one,” Smith wrote in her diary that December. “But the fact remains that [I] have been bitterly disappointed; and the weeks which followed publication were amongst the most unhappy in my life.” The book’s popularity confirmed her greatest fear: that, for all her effort, it would be received not as a literary work but as middlebrow. The critics who mattered had passed it “over as lightweight and unimportant.” She stopped eating and retreated to bed.

Smith may be best known for her children’s book The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), but I Capture the Castle, now considered a Young Adult classic, a very English comedy, a touching romance, and, as it has been repeatedly called, a comfort read, remains her most charismatic work. Yet it has never received the critical treatment Smith hoped for. The cultural conflict that defined her its reception—between “lightweight and unimportant” middlebrow writing and the highbrow literary fiction that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s—is one of the central preoccupations of the novel itself. Beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit, as well as an affecting portrait of the artist as a young girl.

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Smith’s diaries are held at the HGRC. These quotations are the first time they've appeared in print.
“Realism, Modernism, and the Representation of Memory in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Fall 2008).
The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Anna Leszkiewicz

Anna Leszkiewicz is a writer and senior commissioning editor at The New Statesman. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ.