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By Charles Taylor

May 6, 1999 | The atmosphere of Dodie Smith's "I Capture the Castle" is so plummy and familiar that you sink right down into it, as if you were returning to a cherished vacation spot. It doesn't diminish the book's comforts that the opening is given over to the 17-year-old narrator's description of the conditions of damp and cold and hunger in which her genteelly impoverished family live. Her name is Cassandra Mortmain, and her tone -- a verbal sure-footedness masking both longing and doubt -- returns us to the heroines of Jane Austen's novels (from which this book is a pop descendant). The rural English setting, calling up dozens of books and movies, plays to all our cozy Anglophilic fantasies. And we recognize the story's promise of heartbreak and happiness from all those works, American as well as British, in which the hopes of young women exist alongside the threat of imminent, melodramatic disaster, in which family alliances (particularly sisterly alliances) are tested by new romance before emerging strengthened. But beneath all these familiar molds lies something else: a distinctly modern, tough-minded practicality.

Smith's novel was published in Britain in 1948, and according to the jacket copy on the edition St. Martin's Press published in this country last fall, it has never gone out of print there. (This month it comes out here in paperback.) I'd never heard of the book until I came across it while poking around in the hardcover classics section of a local bookstore. I had read Smith's most famous novel, "The Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1956), and believe I would have loved it even if I weren't a sucker for animal stories. (The Disney version -- still the best animated feature it's ever made -- preserved much of the book's spirit.) So I expected a more grown-up version of that book's charm.

And "I Capture the Castle" is charming. It's about how things finally go right for Cassandra and her family. Mostly. From the beginning Smith injects a strain of candor that Cassandra's plucky voice keeps tempting us to glide past. What Smith is doing here recalls -- in a very different tone -- the way Philip Barry, in his play "Holiday," immerses us in the glittering, sophisticated chat of his characters before allowing the melancholy and divisions beneath their words to well up and overwhelm us.

Cassandra, who dreams of becoming a writer and keeps a journal as practice for a novel she plans, lives in a crumbling 17th century house attached to a 14th century castle. Her father is a writer. Or was. His one highly acclaimed novel, published years in the past, provides most of the family's inadequate income. But he's long been blocked and spends his days shut up in the castle's gatehouse reading detective fiction. Cassandra's stepmother, Topaz ("there is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that," Cassandra says), is a flighty but good-hearted younger woman who occasionally contributes to the coffers by taking up her old profession of artist's model. There is also a younger schoolboy brother, Thomas, as well as 18-year-old Stephen, whom the family has cared for since the death of his mother, their former maid. Cassandra is still enough of the dreamer to fall under the spell of their dilapidated surroundings. "Two girls in this strange and lonely house" is how she puts it to her sister, Rose, who, "nearly 21 and very bitter with life," has no such illusions: "She saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud."

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