Discovering Dodie Smith, Mother of Self-Reinvention: Part I

The Amazing Journey of the Author of "The One Hundred and One Dalmatians"

Until Nick Hornby recommended Valerie Grove’s Dear Dodie: The Life of Dodie Smith* on his Substack page, I knew nothing about Smith except her two most famous novels: “I Capture the Castle” and “The One Hundred and One Dalmatians”. The first became a Young Adult classic long before the YA genre existed; the second, of course, was the source of Disney’s …