![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The reason for Rose's predicament is that the girls' father, James Mortmain, is a once famous writer who has had writer's block ever since being sent to prison for brandishing a cake knife at their mother. 'I told her she couldn't go on the streets in the depths of Suffolk,' writes Cassandra. She lives with her brother and older sister, the beautiful Rose, who is 'very bitter at life' because she never meets any eligible men and has decided her only way out is to go on the streets. The opening line - 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink' - is one of the most unforgettable in all twentieth-century fiction.Īn aspiring writer - 'Jane Eyre with a touch of Becky Sharp' - Cassandra combines love of her family with the unsparing and unsentimental eye of adolescence. ![]() The story is told through the eyes of 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain in the pages of her journal. In I Capture the Castle, her first novel, she evoked a family in the 1930s, living in poverty in a house grafted on to the ruins of a moated fourteenth-century castle. Two prose classics in one lifetime is more than most writers achieve. Smith was best known as the most successful woman playwright of her age, though she did produce one other classic novel, The Hundred and One Dalmatians. ![]()
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