Cassandra Mortmain is the middle child in an eccentric English family. Her father is a once-published, once-celebrated author who has had writer's block for years, and as a result, his wife and three children are on the brink of starvation, although they live in a crumbling, albeit leased, castle. They hope that their father will one day begin writing again, or that Cassandra's beautiful elder sister, Rose, will marry well and save them all.

Enter the American Cotton brothers, who are wealthy and have just inherited the nearby estate of Scoatney, as well as the landlordship of the Mortmain's dwelling. Rose Mortmain and her stepmother see nothing but dollar signs as they scheme to marry Rose off to Simon, the eldest Cotton. But Cassandra has fallen for Simon herself...

I was skeptical of this book because the cover was so outdated and plain. The story itself is set in the 1930's, but the book was published in 1948, and it seemed so dated. But once I started reading, I could scarcely put it down. This is classic English literature at its best, with a storyline that will pass from age to age without ever seeming old-fashioned. I highly recommend it and plan to keep my copy forever!!

Dodie Smith may be best-known as the author of The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, but she was the author of many hit West End plays and several best-selling books. If you enjoy mid-20th-century British fiction, may I recommend a perfect gem of a novel, back in print after many years a-languishing: I Capture the Castle, told in first-person narration by Cassandra Mortmain, the younger daughter of a family of impoverished eccentrics living in a small run-down castle in the British countryside, as she tries to "capture" her life in her private journal. Her father is a once-famous writer with a seemingly-insurmountable case of writer's block; her stepmother Topaz is an unusually-gorgeous former model with pretentions of artistry and a loving heart; her beloved sister Rose is hungry for some sort--any sort!--of change. Into this almost Austen-like situation comes Simon, the new landlord, an upper-class American from New England, along with his informal younger brother, raised in California, and their "club woman" mother, and suddenly the potentials and possibilities and coincidences become endlessly interesting...Will Simon propose to Rose? Will Mortmain ever write again? Will Cassandra's swain kiss her in the bluebell wood? Perhaps it doesn't sound like much, but it's engaging and endearing, a period-piece with "good bones" and long-lasting, pleasurable resonance, still holding up well after half a century on the shelves.

On my top-40 list, certainly, if not my top-10. I can't recommend this one highly enough.

"I Capture the Castle" is the 1930's coming-of-age story of 17-year-old Cassandra, who lives in rural Britain with a cast of simultaneously comic and tragic family and friends. During the spring, summer, and autumn months spanned by the story, she pens a diary that describes her first adult lessons about love, sisterhood, and friendship. Although the voice is believably adolescent, the lessons Cassandra learns are completely adult.

"I Capture the Castle" is beautiful in every way a book should be. It's gentle without being sappy, humorous without being mocking, gorgeously (although a bit painstakingly) written without digressing into flights of narcissistic prose. The narrator is both an ordinary child and an extraordinary woman, and her greatest strength as a character is the believability of her weakness. The other characters are interesting and unusual and completely human. The setting, a barely-refurbished medieval castle, is very nearly a character in its own right, and it informs and interacts with the story in a way I've rarely seen outside of the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The book, with all of its lyricism and innocence and wise optimism, teaches a gentle and almost invisible lesson. It's about learning to love fairly and accept love gracefully, about being faithful to your friends even when it hurts, about who constitutes a family and how one goes about caring for them, about how growing up is not the end of a the road but the beginning. It's not a new lesson, but it's one we all need to learn a little more.

But "I Capture the Castle" is more than a beautiful book, and more than a lesson. It's an experience. It's as if Jane Austen had been reborn 130 years later and rewritten "Sense and Sensibility" with a compassion and magic her original work missed. Or as if "Little Women" had been written for adults: just as so many little girls start their own "Pickwick Papers" and take to eating apples in attics after reading Alcott's book, after reading "I Capture the Castle" I wanted to find a ruin in Britain, fit it with indoor plumbing, and spend the timeless days of summer sitting in the tower and penning a journal of my own days and dreams and loves.