Dodie Smith

Dodie Smith was born Dorothy Gladys Smith in 1896 in Whitefield, Lancashire, and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art hoping to be an actress. That career stalled. Writing as C. L. Anthony, she sold her play Autumn Crocus in 1931 and became one of the most successful women dramatists of her generation. Dear Octopus opened in London in 1938.

Her plays were light comedies of middle-class life, praised for how closely they caught ordinary talk. The novels keep that ear. They are funny, brisk and warm, and they usually put an eccentric family at the centre. Her first novel, I Capture the Castle (1948), was written while she was living in America during the Second World War, yet it is set in 1930s England. It is told through the journal of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, who lives in a crumbling castle. The Hundred and One Dalmatians followed in 1956, then its sequel The Starlight Barking in 1967. She also wrote a four-volume autobiography that begins with Look Back with Love, about her Manchester childhood.

Disney adapted the Dalmatians book as an animated film in 1961 and a live-action film in 1996. In the BBC's Big Read poll of 2003, I Capture the Castle came in at number 82. A film version, with Romola Garai as Cassandra and Bill Nighy as her father, came out the same year.

If you arrived through I Capture the Castle, try The Hundred and One Dalmatians next. It is a much shorter book with the same quick humour and the same comic domestic detail. Readers who like her voice on stage can then look for the play Dear Octopus.