Love, loyalty and the bond between sisters are explored and celebrated in Dodie Smith’s enduring classic. The Folio Society edition of I Capture the Castle features charming illustrations by Sarah Dyer.
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‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...’
Folio presents a beautiful new edition of I Capture the Castle, the captivating tale of Cassandra and Rose Mortmain and the romantic complications that ensue with the arrival of a pair of rich American brothers. For this special edition of Dodie Smith’s celebrated classic, artist Sarah Dyer has created six new colour images as well as a charming binding design that references the opening line, one of the best known in all of literature. The endpapers, embellished with gold stars against a blue background, are inspired by Cassandra Mortmain’s two guinea notebook, and the title page illustration grants a gorgeous introduction to ramshackle Godsend Castle itself. Whether I Capture the Castle is an old favourite or a new discovery, this beautiful edition is sure to be one that’s returned to again and again.
Bound in printed cloth
Set in Perpetua with Relation display
392 pages
6 full-page colour illustrations, plus an integrated black & white title-page spread
Printed endpapers
Slipcased
9½˝ x 6¼˝
The eccentric Mortmain family are happy, but poor. Father, who once wrote a very important book, hasn’t written a useful word since, and every bit of money they possessed has been sunk into their remarkable home: a Victorian oddity grafted onto the side of a ruined castle. Daughters Cassandra and Rose spend their lives making do, but change might be on the way with the arrival of the Cotton brothers, rich Americans who own nearby Scoatney Hall. Surely one of them might be in want of a wife? While older sister Rose attempts to fall madly in love with at least one of them, Cassandra records their turbulent year in her journal – and in doing so discovers that her own heart could be at stake.
‘I know of few novels that inspire as much fierce lifelong affection in their readers.’
- Joanna Trollope
Smith wrote I Capture the Castle whilst living in California, having moved there with her husband at the outbreak of the Second World War. As well as capturing the thrills and agonies of first love, the book is full of Smith’s longing for England: the countryside is depicted in exquisite detail, and seasons move through the book like characters themselves. Sarah Dyer’s illustrations are humorous and sensitive, seeming to hover – as Cassandra does – between the world of childhood and the realm of adults. Her witty colour images capture a myriad of small details – a lily pad on the moat, the pink blush of Heloïse’s nose – and the black-and-white title page illustration has been drawn in soft pencil, as if Cassandra herself sketched it in one of her own notebooks.
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