Cassandra Captures Happiness 
 I don't really want to write any more, I just want to lie here and think. But there is something I want to capture. It has to do with the feeling I had when I watched the Cottons coming down the lane, the queer separate feeling. I like seeing people when they can't see me. I have often looked at our family through lighted windows and they seem quite different, a bit like the way rooms seen in looking-glasses do. I can't get the feeling into words--it slipped away when I tried to capture it. 
 Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain can't decide whether she wants to be Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austen. But when two rich American brothers, Simon and Neil Cotton, move into the big house nearby and become the landlords of the semi-ruined castle where her family live, the choice seems to be made. She immediately thinks of Bingley and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and watches as her older sister Rose (almost 21) begins the old dance with the two young men. 
 And what of Cassandra herself? J. K. Rowling describes her as "one of the most charismatic narrators I have ever met." And she is right. As Cassandra uses her journal to capture the castle and her family, we first laugh with her, then marvel at the acuteness of her observation, then feel for her as she struggles with things she cannot so easily capture: the confused emotional awareness of a girl entering womanhood over the span of a long English summer. 
 Though published in 1948, the novel is set in the 1930s. Cassandra 's father, James Mortmain, has published one book, Jacob Wrestling, which critics have compared to Joyce; however, he has written nothing more for years, royalties have dried up, and his family live in genteel poverty. But in most romantic surroundings. While still affluent, Mortmain fixed up an old house built in the ruins of Godsend Castle. Then his wife died, leaving him with two girls and a boy: Rose, Cassandra, and Thomas--20, 17, and 15 when the novel opens. He has married a much younger woman, an artist's model named Topaz, strikingly beautiful and totally devoted. She presides over a largely empty house (since most of the furniture has been sold), while Mortmain holes up in the medieval gatehouse reading detective novels. The only useful male around is Stephen, the son of their former maid, whom the Mortmains took in after her death--thus adding a Heathcliff figure to the mix. 
 All seems set for an English rural comedy, much in the manner of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm. And indeed I found myself laughing continually over the first few chapters. But just as I was beginning to wonder (as I did also with the Gibbons) whether comedy alone was enough to keep the book going, the plot got moving and the novel deepened. But not necessarily in tandem. The romantic situations certainly built nicely, with Rose, Cassandra, and their father falling (not necessarily respectively) under the spell of Simon, Neil, and their mother; add to the mix Stephen and a predatory female photographer, and you get enough plot twists to surprise even me, let alone our innocent narrator Cassandra. But in many ways, the depth developed quite separately from the plot. For example, there is a scene later in the book when Cassandra consults the village Vicar that touches on real profundity. Though a minor character, the Vicar is a splendid portrait of a man of the cloth whose intellect and humanity are not constricted by his calling.* Cassandra is not a believer at all, and he respects that, but he nonetheless advises her to go into the church and simply listen: 
 I could hear the rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: "I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness." 
 You may note that I have put this book on my "Young Adult" shelf. I don't mean to reduce it by so doing; although about a young adult, it is written for adult readers, unlike Dodie Smith's famous children's book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians. But it is also a book I would happily give to my granddaughter when she enters her teens. Although there are quite adult shadows on the horizon, this is about as far as we get in the actual text, where Cassandra is thinking what marriage means: 
 And I still wouldn't like it. Oh, I'd love the clothes and the wedding. I am not so sure I would like the facts of life, but I have got over the bitter disappointment I felt when I first heard about them, and one obviously has to try them sooner or later. What I'd really hate would be the settled feeling, with nothing but happiness to look forward to. 
 That is her voice, absolutely. Cassandra might shrink from the happy-ever-after prospect, but in fact she is rather good at capturing happiness when it comes. Here, to show how she herself develops as a person, are two of her descriptions of happiness. The first comes at the end of the first chapter, before the story has really started: 
 I finish this entry sitting on the stairs. I think it worthy of note that I have never felt happier in my life--despite sorrow for father, pity for Rose, embarrassment about Stephen's poetry and no justification for hope as regards our family's general outlook. Perhaps it is because I have satisfied my creative urge; or it may be due to the thought of eggs for tea. 
 The second is closer to the end of the book. I can only quote a few lines of Smith's magnificent extended passage, but they are enough to show that, though still only 17, Cassandra is growing up: 
 The castle seemed to be mine in a way it never had been before; the day seemed specially to belong to me; I even had a feeling that I owned myself more than I usually do. I became very conscious of all my movements--if I raised my arm I looked at it wonderingly, thinking, "That is mine!" And I took pleasure in moving, both in the physical effort and in the touch of the air--it was most queer how the air did seem to touch me, even when it was absolutely still. All day long I had a sense of great ease and spaciousness. And my happiness had a strange, remembered quality as though I had lived it before. Oh, how can I recapture it--that utterly right, homecoming sense of recognition? 
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 *Second only to the Rev. Will Ransome in Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent. It was Perry's list of formative books in the appendix to her wonderful novel that convinced me to give Dodie Smith a try.