Dodie Smith

Biography
She was born at Whitefield, near Bury in Lancashire, but her family soon moved to a detached house in Old Trafford, Manchester. The formative years of her childhood were spent at this house. Her father, Ernest Smith, died when Dodie was a baby, and her mother, Ella Furber Smith, remarried when Dodie was 14, at which time the family relocated to London. In 1914, Dodie entered the Academy (later Royal Academy) of Dramatic Art, and Ella died of breast cancer. During Ella's illness, mother and daughter became followers of Christian Science. (Smith, 1974).

Dodie unsuccessfully pursued a career as an actress. In 1923, she took a job in Heals furniture store in London and became the toy buyer (and a mistress of the chairman, Ambrose Heal).[1] She authored her first play, Autumn Crocus, in 1931 under the pseudonym C.L. Anthony. Its success, and the discovery of her identity by journalists, inspired the newspaper headline, "Shopgirl Writes Play". (Smith, 1979).

She spent most of her years as a writer living in a townhouse in London, where a plaque now commemorates her occupation. In 1939, she married Alec Beesley, another employee at Heal's.

During the 1940s, she and her husband moved to the United States due to legal difficulties with Beesley's stand as a conscientious objector. (Smith, 1979). While living in the U.S. and feeling homesick for England, she wrote her first novel, I Capture the Castle (1948). During the American interlude, the Beesleys became friends with writers Christopher Isherwood, Charles Brackett, and John Van Druten. In Smith's memoirs, she credits Alec with making the suggestion to Van Druten that he adapt Isherwood's Sally Bowles story, from Goodbye to Berlin, into a play (the Van Druten play, I Am A Camera, later became the musical Cabaret).

Smith is best known for her novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) (which was rather loosely adapted into the Disney animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians). Her novel I Capture the Castle also has a devoted following (a film version was released in 2003).

Smith died in 1990 and named Julian Barnes as her literary executor, a job she felt would not be much work. Barnes writes of the complicated task in his essay "Literary Executions", revealing among other things how he secured the return of the film rights to I Capture the Castle, which had been held by Disney since 1949. (Barnes, 2003). Smith's personal papers are housed in Boston University's Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, and include manuscripts, photographs, artwork, and correspondence (including letters from Christopher Isherwood and John Gielgud).


[edit] List of Works
Plays

Autumn Crocus (1931)
Service (1932)
Touch Wood (1934)
Call It A Day (1935)
Bonnet Over the Windmill (1937)
Dear Octopus (1938)
Lovers and Friends (1943)
Letter from Paris (1952)
I Capture the Castle (1954)
Novels

I Capture the Castle (1948)
The Hundred and One Dalmatians, or The Great Dog Robbery (1956)
The New Moon with the Old (1963)
The Town in Bloom (1965)
It Ends with Revelations (1967)
The Starlight Barking (1967)
A Tale of Two Families (1970)
The Girl from the Candle-lit Bath (1978)
The Midnight Kittens (1978)
Autobiography

Look Back with Love: a Manchester Childhood (1974)
Look Back with Mixed Feelings (1978)
Look Back with Astonishment (1979)
Look Back with Gratitude (1985)

[edit] The Hundred and One Dalmatians
Pongo, the canine protagonist of The Hundred and One Dalmatians, was named after Smith's own pet Dalmatian, the first of nine. Smith got the idea for her novel when a friend remarked at her own dalmatians: “Those dogs would make a lovely fur coat!”


[edit] References
Barnes, Julian. (2003). Literary Executions. In: Arana, Marie The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work : A Collection from the Washington Post Book World. New York: PublicAffairs.
Grove, Valerie (1996). Dear Dodie: the life of Dodie Smith. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 0701157534.
Smith, Dodie (1979). Look Back With Astonishment. London: W.H. Allen. ISBN 0491021984.
Smith, Dodie (1985). Look Back With Gratitude. London: Muller, Blond & White. ISBN 058411124X.
Smith, Dodie (1974). Look Back With Love: A Manchester Childhood. London: Heinemann. ISBN 0434713554.
Smith, Dodie (1978). Look Back With Mixed Feelings. London: W.H. Allen. ISBN 0491020732.
^ Alan Crawford, "Heal, Sir Ambrose (1872–1959)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 12 Aug 2007