Smith, D: I Capture the Castle

Dodie Smith was born in Lancashire in 1896. She trained at RADA and went on to carve out a career as both a novelist and a playwright, producing seven novels and ten plays. She wrote I Capture the Castle during the Second World War while living in America with her husband, and it was a great commercial and critical success when published in 1949. Some seven years later her children's classic, The Hundred and One Dalmatians - inspired by her own beloved Dalmatian, Pongo - was published. It remains the work for which she is probably most well-known, in large part thanks to the iconic Walt Disney film based on it. Dodie Smith died in 1990.