Dodie Smith (1896–1990)
Author of I Capture the Castle
About the Author
Series
Works by Dodie Smith
The 101 dalmatians 2 copies
101 dalmācietis 2 copies
Walt Disney's 101 Dalmatians 1 copy
Disney 101 Dalmatians 1 copy
101 Dalmatians (Bk Block) 1 copy
HLa Icarica dei 101 1 copy
New Orleans Mourning 1 copy
Associated Works
101 Dalmatians (Disney's Wonderful World of Reading) (1977) — Original story — 1,352 copies, 5 reviews
Walt Disney's 101 Dalmatians with Pictures From The Movie (1960) — Original story — 133 copies, 3 reviews
101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure (Disney's Wonderful World of Reading) (2003) — Original characters — 102 copies
The Graphic Canon of Children's Literature: The World's Greatest Kids' Lit as Comics and Visuals (2014) — Contributor — 93 copies, 1 review
101 Dalmatians (Disney 101 Dalmatians) (Step into Reading) (1996) — Original characters — 57 copies, 2 reviews
The Hundred and One Dalmatians: Cruella and Cadpig (2017) — Original characters — 34 copies, 1 review
The Hundred and One Dalmatians (Penguin Young Readers, Level 3) (2001) — Original characters — 20 copies
5 Books! 1) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time 2) I Capture the Castle 3) The Glass Castle 4) The Devil… (2001) — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Smith, Dodie
- Legal name
- Smith, Dorothy Gladys Beesley
- Other names
- Anthony, C. L. (pseudonym)
Percy, Charles Henry (pseudonym) - Birthdate
- 1896-05-03
- Date of death
- 1990-11-24
- Burial location
- Cremated, Ashes scattered.
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- UK
- Country (for map)
- England, UK
- Birthplace
- Whitefield, Lancashire, England, UK
- Place of death
- Uttlesford, Essex, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Whitefield, Lancashire, England, UK
Manchester, England, UK
London, England, UK
Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA - Education
- Academy of Dramatic Art
St. Paul's Girls' School - Occupations
- children's book author
playwright
novelist
autobiographer
actor - Relationships
- Heal, Ambrose (lover)
Barnes, Julian (literary executor) - Agent
- Laurence Fitch (estate agent)
- Short biography
- Dorothy "Dodie" Smith was born in Whitefield, Lancashire, England. Her father died when she was 18 months old, and her mother took her to live with her grandparents, aunts, and uncles in Manchester. Influenced by an uncle who was an amateur actor, Dodie went on the stage by age 13, playing boy's parts. Her mother remarried in 1910 and the family moved to London. Dodie enrolled in the Academy of Dramatic Art and pursued a career as an actress for several years, with little success. In 1923, she gave up acting and took a job as a toy buyer for a department store. In 1929, she went to Leipzig, Germany for the annual toy fair, and spent some time with a friend at an inn in a small German village. On her return to England, she wrote a play, Autumn Crocus (1931), which became a hit. The "girl playwright," as the newspapers called her, then had five successful plays in a row on the London stage. In 1938, she moved to the USA with her companion and business manager, Alec Beesley, who was a pacifist. They married the following year. She began working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in 1941. In 1948, she published her first novel, I Capture the Castle, which was an immediate success. She returned to Britain in 1951 and had another major success with The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), later adapted into the hugely popular animated film by Disney. She continued to write books for adults and children into the 1980s, including her four volumes of autobiography, Look Back With Love: A Manchester Childhood (1974) followed by Look Back With Mixed Feelings, Look Back With Astonishment, and Look Back With Gratitude.
Members
Discussions
Found: romance novel set in scotland, mid 20th century in Name that Book (February 2021)
Reviews
Well-loved books from my past
Title: [THE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS]
Author: [[DODIE SMITH]]
Rating: 5 stars out of five, because I still love the memory of being rescued
The Book Description: Pongo and Missis had a lovely life. With their human owners, the Dearlys, to look after them, they lived in a comfortable home in London with their 15 adorable Dalmatian puppies, loved and admired by all. Especially the Dearlys' neighbor Cruella de Vil, a fur-fancying fashion plate with designs on the show more Dalmatians' spotted coats! So, when the puppies are stolen from the Dearly home, and even Scotland Yard is unable to find them, Pongo and Missis know they must take matters into their own paws! The delightful children's classic adapted twice for popular Disney productions. Ages 8-11
(This is from a 1996 Barnes and Noble edition)
My Review: Mine wasn't an especially happy childhood. The particulars don't matter all that much, what does is that I was on my own in an adult emotional landscape a long time before that was a good idea. I am lucky beyond luck that I seem to have been born with a love of reading. Both my parents and both my older sisters read to me a lot when I was a kid, which doubtless had a lot to do with fanning the flames of my obsession with books; but there was never a sense in me that there was something else I'd rather be doing, even watching TV.
My mother and I, after the aforementioned sisters left us and my father was removed from our world, had all sorts of books in our house. I was the only kid I knew with a 6-foot-tall bookcase of my own books in his room when there was one digit in my age. And it saved my sanity, that stuffed story-world, so many many times.
One of the books that spoke to me on every level, which I discovered in the Allandale branch of the Austin Public Library, was this book. I was nine, I was miserably angry and unhappy, and I didn't know that anything was wrong. I found this book, this fabulous perfect rescue fantasy of authority figures who don't know their butts from their elbows but who know that they love, and want, their charges to be safe, and who go to extraordinary lengths to make it happen...well! That sounded peachy keen to my abandoned boy self. So I checked it out, and I read it. And I read it. And read it.
Easily a hundred times over the next two years.
No authority figures rescued me. I found some who loved me, but none could, or would, see the emotional hell I was in. When I was about twelve, the fantasy stopped satisfying my need and instead made its unsatisfied nature worse. So I stopped reading the book.
This christmas I decided to read the book again, just to see if there was as much here as I remembered, and to look at the pages with adult eyes.
I can't see it with adult eyes. Just as that desperate child full of reinflicted pain and rage. Oh the poor thing, I'd think, no wonder he re-read the book so often, look at this, or this...everything, really. It was a perfectly ordinary kid's book of its day, misogyny and elitism and racism permeating it with an almost industrial strength stench. But it also rang, and rings, true: Rescue me! It's a cry many kids don't vocalize but they do feel. Sometimes, for the lucky ones, they find stories to crutch them onwards towards adulthood.
For me, this was one fine, sturdy crutch. I still love it, and I still thank Dodie Smith for it, with all its time-and-place flaws. It's wonderfully parenthetical in its style and it's simply deliciously fantastically comfortable and comforting in its plotting.
A grateful salute, then, Miss Dodie Smith, from a forty-plus year distance, from a young redheaded fat kid lost in so many ways, for writing him a star to guide him. I'm here today because you did. show less
Title: [THE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS]
Author: [[DODIE SMITH]]
Rating: 5 stars out of five, because I still love the memory of being rescued
The Book Description: Pongo and Missis had a lovely life. With their human owners, the Dearlys, to look after them, they lived in a comfortable home in London with their 15 adorable Dalmatian puppies, loved and admired by all. Especially the Dearlys' neighbor Cruella de Vil, a fur-fancying fashion plate with designs on the show more Dalmatians' spotted coats! So, when the puppies are stolen from the Dearly home, and even Scotland Yard is unable to find them, Pongo and Missis know they must take matters into their own paws! The delightful children's classic adapted twice for popular Disney productions. Ages 8-11
(This is from a 1996 Barnes and Noble edition)
My Review: Mine wasn't an especially happy childhood. The particulars don't matter all that much, what does is that I was on my own in an adult emotional landscape a long time before that was a good idea. I am lucky beyond luck that I seem to have been born with a love of reading. Both my parents and both my older sisters read to me a lot when I was a kid, which doubtless had a lot to do with fanning the flames of my obsession with books; but there was never a sense in me that there was something else I'd rather be doing, even watching TV.
My mother and I, after the aforementioned sisters left us and my father was removed from our world, had all sorts of books in our house. I was the only kid I knew with a 6-foot-tall bookcase of my own books in his room when there was one digit in my age. And it saved my sanity, that stuffed story-world, so many many times.
One of the books that spoke to me on every level, which I discovered in the Allandale branch of the Austin Public Library, was this book. I was nine, I was miserably angry and unhappy, and I didn't know that anything was wrong. I found this book, this fabulous perfect rescue fantasy of authority figures who don't know their butts from their elbows but who know that they love, and want, their charges to be safe, and who go to extraordinary lengths to make it happen...well! That sounded peachy keen to my abandoned boy self. So I checked it out, and I read it. And I read it. And read it.
Easily a hundred times over the next two years.
No authority figures rescued me. I found some who loved me, but none could, or would, see the emotional hell I was in. When I was about twelve, the fantasy stopped satisfying my need and instead made its unsatisfied nature worse. So I stopped reading the book.
This christmas I decided to read the book again, just to see if there was as much here as I remembered, and to look at the pages with adult eyes.
I can't see it with adult eyes. Just as that desperate child full of reinflicted pain and rage. Oh the poor thing, I'd think, no wonder he re-read the book so often, look at this, or this...everything, really. It was a perfectly ordinary kid's book of its day, misogyny and elitism and racism permeating it with an almost industrial strength stench. But it also rang, and rings, true: Rescue me! It's a cry many kids don't vocalize but they do feel. Sometimes, for the lucky ones, they find stories to crutch them onwards towards adulthood.
For me, this was one fine, sturdy crutch. I still love it, and I still thank Dodie Smith for it, with all its time-and-place flaws. It's wonderfully parenthetical in its style and it's simply deliciously fantastically comfortable and comforting in its plotting.
A grateful salute, then, Miss Dodie Smith, from a forty-plus year distance, from a young redheaded fat kid lost in so many ways, for writing him a star to guide him. I'm here today because you did. show less
I have finally read this very old young adult classic, and glad that I did. A wonderfully different coming-of-age story for one impoverished English girl and her very interesting family. Cassandra Mortmain lives in the castle with her family, sister Rose, brother Thomas, father, who after publishing one successful novel, has a bad case of writer's block, stepmother, Topaz, an artist's model, and Stephen, the orphan child of their former maid, along with Abelard the cat, and Heloise the dog. show more
Into their impoverished lives in their drafty old castle come Simon and Neil Cotton, from America. Simon has inherited an estate and is now a wealthy man.
So many plot lines here: Rose determined to marry Simon so they can stop being so poor, the father who is negligent and depressed and even abusive, Stephen, who loves Cassandra, and seems like a wonderful choice, except she doesn't return his feelings, Neil who just wants to return to America and buy a ranch out west, and who seems to loathe Rose. And Cassandra, who falls unfortunately in love with Simon, who is pledged to her sister.
In first person, Cassandra paints a vivid portrait of their lives in the castle, with her sharp eye for everything around her. It is not a fast-paced novel; you have to enjoy descriptive writing. The real action doesn't happen til Rose and Simon become engaged. There is one hilarious scene involving a bear and a train station earlier on, that had me laughing out loud.
What I am curious about now is the author, Dodie Smith, who also wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians! She has written other novels, which don't seem to have made much of an impression.
I think teens who like reading and who are Anglophiles would love this novel. show less
Into their impoverished lives in their drafty old castle come Simon and Neil Cotton, from America. Simon has inherited an estate and is now a wealthy man.
So many plot lines here: Rose determined to marry Simon so they can stop being so poor, the father who is negligent and depressed and even abusive, Stephen, who loves Cassandra, and seems like a wonderful choice, except she doesn't return his feelings, Neil who just wants to return to America and buy a ranch out west, and who seems to loathe Rose. And Cassandra, who falls unfortunately in love with Simon, who is pledged to her sister.
In first person, Cassandra paints a vivid portrait of their lives in the castle, with her sharp eye for everything around her. It is not a fast-paced novel; you have to enjoy descriptive writing. The real action doesn't happen til Rose and Simon become engaged. There is one hilarious scene involving a bear and a train station earlier on, that had me laughing out loud.
What I am curious about now is the author, Dodie Smith, who also wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians! She has written other novels, which don't seem to have made much of an impression.
I think teens who like reading and who are Anglophiles would love this novel. show less
I am still trying to figure out my reaction to this book. It is told from the viewpoint of Jill, who is married to an actor, and follows what happens after they meet a widowed MP and his two daughters. Everything seems nice and sunny on the surface, but as the book goes along we see secrets revealed, and our perceptions of characters and our sympathies shift with each chapter. Much of the book refers to the theatre, and a lot of the dialogue seemed to me as though it could have come from a show more play - the characters do talk a lot about their thoughts and feelings. The ending came as a bit of a shock to me, and I felt myself getting quite angry at how other people basically decide Jill's future for her - this is a 34 year old woman, not a young girl! A couple of characters who I had greatly liked up to that point suddenly appeared to be absolute monsters! The implied outcome at the end of the book is the one that many readers will have hoped for from the start, but it is how it comes to pass that makes it bittersweet. I'm quite sure that this is what Smith intended, but it did surprise me after the essential niceness of the build up. Recommended, although the discussion of homosexuality seems a bit dated. show less
“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!”
“I would rather be in a Charlotte Bronte.”
“Which would be better – Jane with a touch of Charlotte, or Charlotte with a touch of Jane?”
This is a terribly self-aware novel from this early exchange onward. Cassandra and Rose are two sisters who live in a castle in the English countryside, with an author for a father. But unlike the romance and ease of either Austen or Bronte, the Mortmain family is terribly impoverished – they live in show more the castle because they essentially pay no rent on it – and their father’s writing has been stalled for years after only one critically-received novel. The prose and whimsy are indeed Austen-Bronte, but the realities of their situation are full of poverty and grit. But they are resilient and imaginative.
The girls’ lives are changed when two American brothers move in nearby with their mother. The Mortmains rarely get visitors in their dilapidated castle, so for them the visitors are almost a sign of fate that these two will be their suitors – again, shades of Austen, but the brothers’ approach of the castle and family as a curiosity or oddity only undermines the romantic anticipation that the girls have. Cassandra, who has never been in a relationship before, is particularly taken aback by how their relationships do work out in contrast to how she’s learned out of books that they work. The literary-ness of this book is particularly delightful, as Cassandra works out the relationship of her literature and her writing to the less neat, badly plotted realities of life. show less
“I would rather be in a Charlotte Bronte.”
“Which would be better – Jane with a touch of Charlotte, or Charlotte with a touch of Jane?”
This is a terribly self-aware novel from this early exchange onward. Cassandra and Rose are two sisters who live in a castle in the English countryside, with an author for a father. But unlike the romance and ease of either Austen or Bronte, the Mortmain family is terribly impoverished – they live in show more the castle because they essentially pay no rent on it – and their father’s writing has been stalled for years after only one critically-received novel. The prose and whimsy are indeed Austen-Bronte, but the realities of their situation are full of poverty and grit. But they are resilient and imaginative.
The girls’ lives are changed when two American brothers move in nearby with their mother. The Mortmains rarely get visitors in their dilapidated castle, so for them the visitors are almost a sign of fate that these two will be their suitors – again, shades of Austen, but the brothers’ approach of the castle and family as a curiosity or oddity only undermines the romantic anticipation that the girls have. Cassandra, who has never been in a relationship before, is particularly taken aback by how their relationships do work out in contrast to how she’s learned out of books that they work. The literary-ness of this book is particularly delightful, as Cassandra works out the relationship of her literature and her writing to the less neat, badly plotted realities of life. show less
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Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 50
- Also by
- 29
- Members
- 14,194
- Popularity
- #1,622
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 393
- ISBNs
- 279
- Languages
- 18
- Favorited
- 47
