But the Mortmains aren’t really living in a marriage plot novel, as much as Cassandra likes to think that they are. They’re living in the intersection between a marriage plot novel and a modernist novel, and their story soon fractures in ways Cassandra doesn’t expect. Rose finds that she isn’t in love with Simon, Cassandra finds that she is, and their father’s long-dormant writing career begins to awaken and grow and develop in ways that Cassandra finds confusing and frightening, just as Rose’s love story begins to fall apart. Why does Mortmain encourage Cassandra to be “brisk” with Stephen? What does I Capture the Castle say about class in mid-twentieth-century England? Cassandra does grow up during the year-long course of the novel, and the end, while somewhat overwrought with soap opera machinations, gives me hope she and her family will get through this and start taking care of each other again, but I've got a lingering uneasiness about the family dynamics. Her father shoves her against a wall and doesn't even apologize, and neither he nor Cassandra seem aware he's done anything wrong. This is not a sweet little pastoral look at the English countryside like I expected -- the "we're poor, but it's fun!" approach -- instead, it hides a sort of secret viciousness beneath the jovial front. Every time I meet someone who also loves I Capture the Castle, I know we must be kindred spirits' - Jenny Han, bestselling author of To All the Boys I've Loved Before Now he is chatting to Topaz. I regret to note that he is in his falsely cheerful mood—though I think poor Topaz is grateful for even false cheerfulness from him these days. She adores him, and he seems to take so little interest in her.

The great pleasure of I Capture the Castle is Cassandra’s voice, which remains candid and blunt even when she’s in the deepest throes of heartbreak. At one point her misery is so intense that “I wanted to fling myself down in the mud and beat my way into the ground,” but, she remarks, “I had just enough sense to know what I should look like after trying.” At her most miserable, “I found myself going round leaning against walls — I can’t think why misery makes me lean against walls, but it does.” Cassandra has a wry detachment from her own emotions that keeps them funny but also keeps the feeling running beneath the surface of the book like a stream: You laugh at her heartbreak, but you feel it deeply too.The first half of this was like Jane Austen herself descended from the heavens (godlike) and delivered me, personally, a gift. He is still a splendid-looking man, though his fine features are getting a bit lost in fat and his colouring is fading. It used to be as bright as Rose’s. too much lovey-dovey stuff, not enough practical instruction on the day-to-day of castle acquisition. In I Capture the Castle we follow Cassandra Mortmain, resident of a falling apart British castle, which she inhabits with a brother (Thomas), a sister (Rose), a rather ethereal stepmother (Topaz), her writerly father and a handsome servant and orphan Stephen. It was like the difference between the beautiful old Godsend graves and the new ones open to receive coffins... that time takes the ugliness and horror out of death and turns it into beauty."

The widowed Mortmain's second wife, Topaz, is a beautiful artist's model who enjoys communing with nature, sometimes wearing nothing but hip boots. Rose, Mortmain's elder daughter, is a classic English beauty pining away in the lonely castle, longing for a chance to meet eligible and preferably rich young men. She tells her sister Cassandra that she wants to live in a Jane Austen novel. Cassandra, the younger daughter and the first-person narrator of the novel, has literary ambitions and spends a lot of time developing her writing talent by "capturing" everything around her in her journal. Stephen, the handsome, loyal, live-in son of the Mortmain late maid, and Thomas, the youngest Mortmain child, round out the cast of household characters. Stephen, a "noble soul," is in love with Cassandra, which she finds touching but a bit awkward. Thomas, a schoolboy, is, like Cassandra, considered "tolerably bright". Sacrifice is the secret--you have to sacrifice things for art and it's the same with religions; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain." They have strong opinions about whether Cassandra and Simon Cotton ought to be together (they should not, Simon does not deserve Cassandra) and whether the 2003 movie adaptation was any good (it was not, young Henry Cavill was inspired casting for Stephen but everything else was nonsense). They have read I Capture the Castle and fallen under its immensely charming and slightly melancholy spell, and they know that everyone else who loves that book must be a kindred spirit. I wish I knew of a way to make words flow out of father. Years and years ago, he wrote a very unusual book called Jacob Wrestling, a mixture of fiction, philosophy and poetry. It had a great success, particularly in America, where he made a lot of money by lecturing on it, and he seemed likely to become a very important writer indeed. But he stopped writing. Mother believed this was due to something that happened when I was about five.This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain captures the castle in her insightful, witty journal entries.” —Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling The kitchen looks very beautiful now. The firelight glows steadily through the bars and through the round hole in the top of the range where the lid has been left off. It turns the whitewashed walls rosy; even the dark beams in the roof are a dusky gold. The highest beam is over thirty feet from the ground. Rose and Topaz are two tiny figures in a great glowing cave. I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic—two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it. The house itself was built in the time of Charles II, but it was grafted on to a fourteenth-century castle that had been damaged by Cromwell. The whole of our east wall was part of the castle; there are two round towers in it. The gatehouse is intact and a stretch of the old walls at their full height joins it to the house. And Belmotte Tower, all that remains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by. But I won’t attempt to describe our peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now. Summers, Sue (6 April 2003). "Her castle was her home". The Guardian. ISSN 0029-7712 . Retrieved 17 February 2023. Now Rose is sitting on the fender, waiting for her iron to heat. She is staring at Topaz with a discontented expression. I can often tell what Rose is thinking and I would take a bet that she is envying the orange tea-gown and hating her own skimpy old blouse and skirt. Poor Rose hates most things she has and envies most things she hasn’t. I really am just as discontented, but I don’t seem to notice it so much. I feel quite unreasonably happy this minute, watching them both; knowing I can go and join them in the warmth, yet staying here in the cold.